Guide to Interpretable Machine Learning

If you can't explain it simply, you don't understand it well enough. Disclaimer: This article draws and expands upon material from (1) Christoph Molnar's excellent book on Interpretable Machine Learning which I definitely recommend to the curious reader, (2) a deep learning visualization workshop from Harvard ComputeFest 2020, as well as (3) material from CS282R at Harvard University taught by Ike Lage and Hima Lakkaraju, who are both prominent researchers in the field of interpretability and explainability. This article is meant to condense and summarize the field of interpretable machine learning to the average data scientist and to stimulate interest in the subject. Machine learning systems are becoming increasingly employed in complex high-stakes settings such as medicine (e.g. Despite this increased utilization, there is still a lack of sufficient techniques available to be able to explain and interpret the decisions of these deep learning algorithms. This can be very problematic in some areas where the decisions of algorithms must be explainable or attributable to certain features due to laws or regulations (such as the right to explanation), or where accountability is required. The need for algorithmic accountability has been highlighted many times, the most notable cases of which are Google's facial recognition algorithm that labeled some black people as gorillas, and Uber's self-driving car which ran a stop sign. Due to the inability of Google to fix the algorithm and remove the algorithmic bias that resulted in this issue, they solved the problem by removing words relating to monkeys from Google Photo's search engine. This illustrates the alleged black box nature of many machine learning algorithms. The black box problem is predominantly associated with the supervised machine learning paradigm due to its predictive nature. Accuracy alone is no longer enough. Academics in deep learning are acutely aware of this interpretability and explainability problem, and whilst some argue that these models are essentially black boxes, there have been several developments in recent years which have been developed for visualizing aspects of deep neural networks such the features and representations they have learned. The term info-besity has been thrown around to refer to the difficulty of providing transparency when decisions are made on the basis of many individual features, due to an overload of information.