Purpose To conduct a systematic review of machine learning models for predicting violent behaviour by synthesising and appraising their validity, usefulness, and performance. Methods We systematically searched nine bibliographic databases and Google Scholar up to September 2025 for development and/or validation studies on machine learning methods for predicting all forms of violent behaviour. We synthesised the results by summarising discrimination and calibration performance statistics and evaluated study quality by examining risk of bias and clinical utility. Results We identified 38 studies reporting the development and validation of 40 models. Most studies reported Area Under the Curve (AUC) as the discrimination statistic with a range of 0.68-0.99. Only eight studies reported calibration performance, and three studies reported external validation. 31 studies had a high risk of bias, mainly in the analysis domain, and three studies had low risk of bias. The overall clinical utility of violence prediction models is poor, as indicated by risks of overfitting due to small samples, lack of transparent reporting, and low generalisability. Conclusion Although black box machine learning models currently have limited applicability in clinical settings, they may show promise for identifying high-risk individuals. We recommend five key considerations for violence prediction modelling: (i) ensuring methodological quality (e.g. following guidelines) and interdisciplinary collaborations; (ii) using black box algorithms only for highly complex data; (iii) incorporating dynamic predictions to allow for risk monitoring; (iv) developing more trustworthy algorithms using explainable methods; and (v) applying causal machine learning approaches where appropriate.

International series in pure and applied mathematics.

Over the past decade, machine learning (ML) models are being increasingly deployed to make a variety of consequential decisions ranging from hiring decisions to loan approvals.

Since the early days of the Explainable AI movement, post-hoc explanations have been praised for their potential to improve user understanding, promote trust, and reduce patient safety risks in black box medical AI systems. Recently, however, critics have argued that the benefits of post-hoc explanations are greatly exaggerated since they merely approximate, rather than replicate, the actual reasoning processes that black box systems take to arrive at their outputs. In this article, we aim to defend the value of post-hoc explanations against this recent critique. We argue that even if post-hoc explanations do not replicate the exact reasoning processes of black box systems, they can still improve users' functional understanding of black box systems, increase the accuracy of clinician-AI teams, and assist clinicians in justifying their AI-informed decisions. While post-hoc explanations are not a "silver bullet" solution to the black box problem in medical AI, we conclude that they remain a useful strategy for addressing the black box problem in medical AI.

In an era where black-box AI models are integral to decision-making across industries, robust methods for explaining these models are more critical than ever. While these models leverage complex feature interplay for accurate predictions, most explanation methods only assign relevance to individual features. There is a research gap in methods that effectively illustrate interactions between features, especially in visualizing higher-order interactions involving multiple features, which challenge conventional representation methods. To address this challenge in local explanations focused on individual instances, we employ a visual, subset-based approach to reveal relevant feature interactions. Our visual analytics tool FINCH uses coloring and highlighting techniques to create intuitive, human-centered visualizations, and provides additional views that enable users to calibrate their trust in the model and explanations. We demonstrate FINCH in multiple case studies, demonstrating its generalizability, and conducted an extensive human study with machine learning experts to highlight its helpfulness and usability. With this approach, FINCH allows users to visualize feature interactions involving any number of features locally.

Rule-based models offer a human-understandable representation, i.e. they are interpretable. For this reason, they are used to explain the decisions of non-interpretable complex models, referred to as black box models. The generation of such explanations involves the approximation of a black box model by a rule-based model. To date, however, it has not been investigated whether the rule-based model makes decisions in the same way as the black box model it approximates. Decision making in the same way is understood in this work as the consistency of decisions and the consistency of the most important attributes used for decision making. This study proposes a novel approach ensuring that the rule-based surrogate model mimics the performance of the black box model. The proposed solution performs an explanation fusion involving rule generation and taking into account the feature importance determined by the selected XAI methods for the black box model being explained. The result of the method can be both global and local rule-based explanations. The quality of the proposed solution was verified by extensive analysis on 30 tabular benchmark datasets representing classification problems. Evaluation included comparison with the reference method and an illustrative case study. In addition, the paper discusses the possible pathways for the application of the rule-based approach in XAI and how rule-based explanations, including the proposed method, meet the user perspective and requirements for both content and presentation. The software created and a detailed report containing the full experimental results are available on the GitHub repository (https://github.com/ruleminer/FI-rules4XAI ).

In recent years, the number of new applications for highly complex AI systems has risen significantly. Algorithmic decision-making systems (ADMs) are one of such applications, where an AI system replaces the decision-making process of a human expert. As one approach to ensure fairness and transparency of such systems, explainable AI (XAI) has become more important. One variant to achieve explainability are surrogate models, i.e., the idea to train a new simpler machine learning model based on the input-output-relationship of a black box model. The simpler machine learning model could, for example, be a decision tree, which is thought to be intuitively understandable by humans. However, there is not much insight into how well the surrogate model approximates the black box. Our main assumption is that a good surrogate model approach should be able to bring such a discriminating behavior to the attention of humans; prior to our research we assumed that a surrogate decision tree would identify such a pattern on one of its first levels. However, in this article we show that even if the discriminated subgroup - while otherwise being the same in all categories - does not get a single positive decision from the black box ADM system, the corresponding question of group membership can be pushed down onto a level as low as wanted by the operator of the system. We then generalize this finding to pinpoint the exact level of the tree on which the discriminating question is asked and show that in a more realistic scenario, where discrimination only occurs to some fraction of the disadvantaged group, it is even more feasible to hide such discrimination. Our approach can be generalized easily to other surrogate models.

Interpretable deep learning aims at developing neural architectures whose decision-making processes could be understood by their users. Among these techniqes, Concept Bottleneck Models enhance the interpretability of neural networks by integrating a layer of human-understandable concepts. These models, however, necessitate training a new model from the beginning, consuming significant resources and failing to utilize already trained large models. To address this issue, we introduce "AnyCBM", a method that transforms any existing trained model into a Concept Bottleneck Model with minimal impact on computational resources. We provide both theoretical and experimental insights showing the effectiveness of AnyCBMs in terms of classification performances and effectivenss of concept-based interventions on downstream tasks.