Local explanation of machine learning (ML) models has recently received significant attention due to its ability to reduce ambiguities about why the models make specific decisions. Extensive efforts have been invested to address explainability for different data types, particularly images. However, the work on multivariate time series data is limited. A possible reason is that the conflation of time and other variables in time series data can cause the generated explanations to be incomprehensible to humans. In addition, some efforts on time series fall short of providing accurate explanations as they either ignore a context in the time domain or impose differentiability requirements on the ML models. Such restrictions impede their ability to provide valid explanations in real-world applications and non-differentiable ML settings. In this paper, we propose a swapping--sliding decision explanation for multivariate time series classifiers, called SSET. The proposal consists of swapping and sliding stages, by which salient sub-sequences causing significant drops in the prediction score are presented as explanations. In the former stage, the important variables are detected by swapping the series of interest with close train data from target classes. In the latter stage, the salient observations of these variables are explored by sliding a window over each time step. Additionally, the model measures the importance of different variables over time in a novel way characterized by multiple factors. We leverage SSET on affect detection domain where evaluations are performed on two real-world physiological time series datasets, WESAD and MAHNOB-HCI, and a deep convolutional classifier, CN-Waterfall. This classifier has shown superior performance to prior models to detect human affective states. Comparing SSET with several benchmarks, including LIME, integrated gradients, and Dynamask, we found..

When used in the context of decision theory, feature importance expresses how much changing the value of a feature can change the model outcome (or the utility of the outcome), compared to other features. Feature importance should not be confused with the feature influence used by most state-of-the-art post-hoc Explainable AI methods. Contrary to feature importance, feature influence is measured against a reference level or baseline. The Contextual Importance and Utility (CIU) method provides a unified definition of global and local feature importance that is applicable also for post-hoc explanations, where the value utility concept provides instance-level assessment of how favorable or not a feature value is for the outcome. The paper shows how CIU can be applied to both global and local explainability, assesses the fidelity and stability of different methods, and shows how explanations that use contextual importance and contextual utility can provide more expressive and flexible explanations than when using influence only.

This work introduces the notion of intermediate concepts based on levels structure to aid explainability for black-box models. The levels structure is a hierarchical structure in which each level corresponds to features of a dataset (i.e., a player-set partition). The level of coarseness increases from the trivial set, which only comprises singletons, to the set, which only contains the grand coalition. In addition, it is possible to establish meronomies, i.e., part-whole relationships, via a domain expert that can be utilised to generate explanations at an abstract level. We illustrate the usability of this approach in a real-world car model example and the Titanic dataset, where intermediate concepts aid in explainability at different levels of abstraction.

Contextual utility theory integrates context-sensitive factors into utility-based decision-making models. It stresses the importance of understanding individual decision-makers' preferences, values, and beliefs and the situational factors that affect them. Contextual utility theory benefits explainable AI. First, it can improve transparency and understanding of how AI systems affect decision-making. It can reveal AI model biases and limitations by considering personal preferences and context. Second, contextual utility theory can make AI systems more personalized and adaptable to users and stakeholders. AI systems can better meet user needs and values by incorporating demographic and cultural data. Finally, contextual utility theory promotes ethical AI development and social responsibility. AI developers can create ethical systems that benefit society by considering contextual factors like societal norms and values. This work, demonstrates how contextual utility theory can improve AI system transparency, personalization, and ethics, benefiting both users and developers.

This paper provides new theory to support to the eXplainable AI (XAI) method Contextual Importance and Utility (CIU). CIU arithmetic is based on the concepts of Multi-Attribute Utility Theory, which gives CIU a solid theoretical foundation. The novel concept of contextual influence is also defined, which makes it possible to compare CIU directly with so-called additive feature attribution (AFA) methods for model-agnostic outcome explanation. One key takeaway is that the "influence" concept used by AFA methods is inadequate for outcome explanation purposes even for simple models to explain. Experiments with simple models show that explanations using contextual importance (CI) and contextual utility (CU) produce explanations where influence-based methods fail. It is also shown that CI and CU guarantees explanation faithfulness towards the explained model.

In the present paper we present the potential of Explainable Artificial Intelligence methods for decision-support in medical image analysis scenarios. With three types of explainable methods applied to the same medical image data set our aim was to improve the comprehensibility of the decisions provided by the Convolutional Neural Network (CNN). The visual explanations were provided on in-vivo gastral images obtained from a Video capsule endoscopy (VCE), with the goal of increasing the health professionals' trust in the black box predictions. We implemented two post-hoc interpretable machine learning methods LIME and SHAP and the alternative explanation approach CIU, centered on the Contextual Value and Utility (CIU). The produced explanations were evaluated using human evaluation. We conducted three user studies based on the explanations provided by LIME, SHAP and CIU. Users from different non-medical backgrounds carried out a series of tests in the web-based survey setting and stated their experience and understanding of the given explanations. Three user groups (n=20, 20, 20) with three distinct forms of explanations were quantitatively analyzed. We have found that, as hypothesized, the CIU explainable method performed better than both LIME and SHAP methods in terms of increasing support for human decision-making as well as being more transparent and thus understandable to users. Additionally, CIU outperformed LIME and SHAP by generating explanations more rapidly. Our findings suggest that there are notable differences in human decision-making between various explanation support settings. In line with that, we present three potential explainable methods that can with future improvements in implementation be generalized on different medical data sets and can provide great decision-support for medical experts.

Machine learning-based systems are rapidly gaining popularity and in-line with that there has been a huge research surge in the field of explainability to ensure that machine learning models are reliable, fair, and can be held liable for their decision-making process. Explainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI) methods are typically deployed to debug black-box machine learning models but in comparison to tabular, text, and image data, explainability in time series is still relatively unexplored. The aim of this study was to achieve and evaluate model agnostic explainability in a time series forecasting problem. This work focused on proving a solution for a digital consultancy company aiming to find a data-driven approach in order to understand the effect of their sales related activities on the sales deals closed. The solution involved framing the problem as a time series forecasting problem to predict the sales deals and the explainability was achieved using two novel model agnostic explainability techniques, Local explainable model-agnostic explanations (LIME) and Shapley additive explanations (SHAP) which were evaluated using human evaluation of explainability. The results clearly indicate that the explanations produced by LIME and SHAP greatly helped lay humans in understanding the predictions made by the machine learning model. The presented work can easily be extended to any time

In this paper we and Cognitive Science, there is a pervasive idea that argue that explanations, while not always perfectly accurate humans employ mental representations in order to in regards to reality (due to the existence of hidden factors), navigate the world and make predictions about outcomes are best structured and involve the same conceptual basis as of future actions. By understanding how decisions, and that when trying to understand an explanation these representational structures work, we not only we do so by simulating the decision-making process through understand more about human cognition but also the explanation provided. In other words, what makes a good gain a better understanding for how humans rationalise explanation of an agent-based action is that it presents us with and explain decisions. This has an influencing a reasoning structure that we can follow and relate to our own effect on explainable AI, where the goal is to decision-making processes. It is thus imperative that the explanations provide explanations of computer decision-making provided by artificial agents, in the context of XAI, for a human audience. We show that the Contextual not only provide deliberations that we can follow, but more Importance and Utility method for XAI share importantly provide them in a conceptual framework which an overlap with the current new wave of actionoriented facilitates retreading the deliberation and is context-sensitive.

In this work, we report the practical and theoretical aspects of Explainable AI (XAI) identified in some fundamental literature. Although there is a vast body of work on representing the XAI backgrounds, most of the corpuses pinpoint a discrete direction of thoughts. Providing insights into literature in practice and theory concurrently is still a gap in this field. This is important as such connection facilitates a learning process for the early stage XAI researchers and give a bright stand for the experienced XAI scholars. Respectively, we first focus on the categories of black-box explanation and give a practical example. Later, we discuss how theoretically explanation has been grounded in the body of multidisciplinary fields. Finally, some directions of future works are presented.

Explainability has been a challenge in AI for as long as AI has existed. With the recently increased use of AI in society, it has become more important than ever that AI systems would be able to explain the reasoning behind their results also to end-users in situations such as being eliminated from a recruitment process or having a bank loan application refused by an AI system. Especially if the AI system has been trained using Machine Learning, it tends to contain too many parameters for them to be analysed and understood, which has caused them to be called `black-box' systems. Most Explainable AI (XAI) methods are based on extracting an interpretable model that can be used for producing explanations. However, the interpretable model does not necessarily map accurately to the original black-box model. Furthermore, the understandability of interpretable models for an end-user remains questionable. The notions of Contextual Importance and Utility (CIU) presented in this paper make it possible to produce human-like explanations of black-box outcomes directly, without creating an interpretable model. Therefore, CIU explanations map accurately to the black-box model itself. CIU is completely model-agnostic and can be used with any black-box system. In addition to feature importance, the utility concept that is well-known in Decision Theory provides a new dimension to explanations compared to most existing XAI methods. Finally, CIU can produce explanations at any level of abstraction and using different vocabularies and other means of interaction, which makes it possible to adjust explanations and interaction according to the context and to the target users.