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Locally Sparse Networks for Interpretable Predictions

arXiv.org Machine Learning

Despite the enormous success of neural networks, they are still hard to interpret and often overfit when applied to low-sample-size (LSS) datasets. To tackle these obstacles, we propose a framework for training locally sparse neural networks where the local sparsity is learned via a sample-specific gating mechanism that identifies the subset of most relevant features for each measurement. The sample-specific sparsity is predicted via a \textit{gating} network, which is trained in tandem with the \textit{prediction} network. By learning these subsets and weights of a prediction model, we obtain an interpretable neural network that can handle LSS data and can remove nuisance variables, which are irrelevant for the supervised learning task. Using both synthetic and real-world datasets, we demonstrate that our method outperforms state-of-the-art models when predicting the target function with far fewer features per instance.


Uncertainty-aware INVASE: Enhanced Breast Cancer Diagnosis Feature Selection

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

In this paper, we present an uncertainty-aware INVASE to quantify predictive confidence of healthcare problem. By introducing learnable Gaussian distributions, we lever-age their variances to measure the degree of uncertainty. Based on the vanilla INVASE, two additional modules are proposed, i.e., an uncertainty quantification module in the predictor, and a reward shaping module in the selector. We conduct extensive experiments on UCI-WDBC dataset. Notably, our method eliminates almost all predictive bias with only about 20% queries, while the uncertainty-agnostic counterpart requires nearly 100% queries. The open-source implementation with a detailed tutorial is available at https://github.com/jx-zhong-for-academic-purpose/Uncertainty-aware-INVASE/blob/main/tutorialinvase%2B.ipynb.


Q-FIT: The Quantifiable Feature Importance Technique for Explainable Machine Learning

arXiv.org Machine Learning

We introduce a novel framework to quantify the importance of each input feature for model explainability. A user of our framework can choose between two modes: (a) global explanation: providing feature importance globally across all the data points; and (b) local explanation: providing feature importance locally for each individual data point. The core idea of our method comes from utilizing the Dirichlet distribution to define a distribution over the importance of input features. This particular distribution is useful in ranking the importance of the input features as a sample from this distribution is a probability vector (i.e., the vector components sum to 1), Thus, the ranking uncovered by our framework which provides a \textit{quantifiable explanation} of how significant each input feature is to a model's output. This quantifiable explainability differentiates our method from existing feature-selection methods, which simply determine whether a feature is relevant or not. Furthermore, a distribution over the explanation allows to define a closed-form divergence to measure the similarity between learned feature importance under different models. We use this divergence to study how the feature importance trade-offs with essential notions in modern machine learning, such as privacy and fairness. We show the effectiveness of our method on a variety of synthetic and real datasets, taking into account both tabular and image datasets.