Decision trees are a popular machine learning method, known for their inherent explainability. In Explainable AI, decision trees can be used as surrogate models for complex black box AI models or as approximations of parts of such models. A key challenge of this approach is determining how accurately the extracted decision tree represents the original model and to what extent it can be trusted as an approximation of their behavior. In this work, we investigate the use of the Probably Approximately Correct (PAC) framework to provide a theoretical guarantee of fidelity for decision trees extracted from AI models. Based on theoretical results from the PAC framework, we adapt a decision tree algorithm to ensure a PAC guarantee under certain conditions. We focus on binary classification and conduct experiments where we extract decision trees from BERT-based language models with PAC guarantees. Our results indicate occupational gender bias in these models.

Research on knowledge graph embeddings has recently evolved into knowledge base embeddings, where the goal is not only to map facts into vector spaces but also constrain the models so that they take into account the relevant conceptual knowledge available. This paper examines recent methods that have been proposed to embed knowledge bases in description logic into vector spaces through the lens of their geometric-based semantics. We identify several relevant theoretical properties, which we draw from the literature and sometimes generalize or unify. We then investigate how concrete embedding methods fit in this theoretical framework.

In Formal Concept Analysis, a base for a finite structure is a set of implications that characterizes all valid implications of the structure. This notion can be adapted to the context of Description Logic, where the base consists of a set of concept inclusions instead of implications. In this setting, concept expressions can be arbitrarily large. Thus, it is not clear whether a finite base exists and, if so, how large concept expressions may need to be. We first revisit results in the literature for mining ℰℒ⊥ bases from finite interpretations. Those mainly focus on finding a finite base or on fixing the role depth but potentially losing some of the valid concept inclusions with higher role depth. We then present a new strategy for mining ℰℒ⊥ bases which is adaptable in the sense that it can bound the role depth of concepts depending on the local structure of the interpretation. Our strategy guarantees to capture all ℰℒ⊥ concept inclusions holding in the interpretation, not only the ones up to a fixed role depth. We also consider the case of confident ℰℒ⊥ bases, which requires that some proportion of the domain of the interpretation satisfies the base, instead of the whole domain. This case is useful to cope with noisy data.