In many machine learning applications, it is important to explain the predictions of a black-box classifier. For example, why does a deep neural network assign an image to a particular class? We cast interpretability of black-box classifiers as a combinatorial maximization problem and propose an efficient streaming algorithm to solve it subject to cardinality constraints. By extending ideas from Badanidiyuru et al. [2014], we provide a constant factor approximation guarantee for our algorithm in the case of random stream order and a weakly submodular objective function. This is the first such theoretical guarantee for this general class of functions, and we also show that no such algorithm exists for a worst case stream order.

This paper proposes a new approach STREAK for maximizing weakly submodular functions. The idea is to collect several outputs of the Threshold Greedy algorithm, where the selection is based on a given threshold. The theoretical results of the Threshold Greedy algorithm and STREAK are verified sequentially. STREAK is also used to provide interpretable explanations for neural-networks and the empirical studies are given. This is an interesting work.

In many machine learning applications, it is important to explain the predictions of a black-box classifier. For example, why does a deep neural network assign an image to a particular class? We cast interpretability of black-box classifiers as a combinatorial maximization problem and propose an efficient streaming algorithm to solve it subject to cardinality constraints. By extending ideas from Badanidiyuru et al. [2014], we provide a constant factor approximation guarantee for our algorithm in the case of random stream order and a weakly submodular objective function. This is the first such theoretical guarantee for this general class of functions, and we also show that no such algorithm exists for a worst case stream order.