Accuracy versus interpretability? With generalized additive models (GAMs), you can have both

In this post, I will provide an overview of generalized additive models (GAMs) and their desirable features. Predictive accuracy has long been an important goal of machine learning. But model interpretability has received more attention in recent years. Stakeholders, such as executives, regulators, and domain experts, often want to understand how and why a model makes its predictions before they trust it enough to use it in practice. However, when you train a machine learning model, you typically face a tradeoff between accuracy and interpretability.