A comparative analysis of rule-based, model-agnostic methods for explainable artificial intelligence

The ultimate goal of Explainable Artificial Intelligence is to build models that possess both high accuracy and degree of explainability. Understanding the inferences of such models can be seen as a process that discloses the relationships between their input and output. These relationships can be represented as a set of inference rules which are usually not explicit within a model. Scholars have proposed several methods for extracting rules from data-driven machine-learned models. However, limited work exists on their comparison. This study proposes a novel comparative approach to evaluate and compare the rulesets produced by four post-hoc rule extractors by employing six quantitative metrics. Findings demonstrate that these metrics can actually help identify superior methods over the others thus are capable of successfully modelling distinctively aspects of explainability

Organizational, Sociological and Procedural Uncertainties in Statistical and Machine Learning: A Systematic Literature Review

Driven by the potential of digitalization, statistical learning and machine learning methods are commonly used for scheduling complex processes or forecasting in supply chain domains. However, trust in such methods is hampered by uncertainties in data quality, data exchange platforms, and data processing, affecting its traceability and reliability. Decision-relevant output provided by such methods is prone to trust issues in the data used for training, in the resulting model, and in the infrastructure in which the model is embedded. Considering the vulnerability of supply chains, wrong decisions have far-reaching consequences, raising the question of to what extent systems alone should be trusted for strategic, operational, and tactical decision-making. In this paper, we take a multidisciplinary perspective with the intention to analyze trust in statistical learning and machine learning methods from an organizational, sociological, and procedural perspective. The information base for this article is gathered through a systematic literature review. The central results of our research are a concept matrix comparing papers based on relevant criteria derived from literature and subsequent findings derived from this matrix. We encourage researchers in the fields of supply chain management, sociology, and statistics or machine learning to open up for interdisciplinary research and to build upon our findings

Assessing the communication gap between AI models and healthcare professionals: explainability, utility and trust in AI-driven clinical decision-making

This paper contributes with a pragmatic evaluation framework for explainable Machine Learning (ML) models for clinical decision support. The study revealed a more nuanced role for ML explanation models, when these are pragmatically embedded in the clinical context. Despite the general positive attitude of healthcare professionals (HCPs) towards explanations as a safety and trust mechanism, for a significant set of participants there were negative effects associated with confirmation bias, accentuating model over-reliance and increased effort to interact with the model. Also, contradicting one of its main intended functions, standard explanatory models showed limited ability to support a critical understanding of the limitations of the model. However, we found new significant positive effects which repositions the role of explanations within a clinical context: these include reduction of automation bias, addressing ambiguous clinical cases (cases where HCPs were not certain about their decision) and support of less experienced HCPs in the acquisition of new domain knowledge.Comment: supplementary information in the main pd

Notions of explainability and evaluation approaches for explainable artificial intelligence

Explainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI) has experienced a significant growth over the last few years. This is due to the widespread application of machine learning, particularly deep learning, that has led to the development of highly accurate models that lack explainability and interpretability. A plethora of methods to tackle this problem have been proposed, developed and tested, coupled with several studies attempting to define the concept of explainability and its evaluation. This systematic review contributes to the body of knowledge by clustering all the scientific studies via a hierarchical system that classifies theories and notions related to the concept of explainability and the evaluation approaches for XAI methods. The structure of this hierarchy builds on top of an exhaustive analysis of existing taxonomies and peer-reviewed scientific material. Findings suggest that scholars have identified numerous notions and requirements that an explanation should meet in order to be easily understandable by end-users and to provide actionable information that can inform decision making. They have also suggested various approaches to assess to what degree machine-generated explanations meet these demands. Overall, these approaches can be clustered into human-centred evaluations and evaluations with more objective metrics. However, despite the vast body of knowledge developed around the concept of explainability, there is not a general consensus among scholars on how an explanation should be defined, and how its validity and reliability assessed. Eventually, this review concludes by critically discussing these gaps and limitations, and it defines future research directions with explainability as the starting component of any artificial intelligent system

A Quantitative Evaluation of Global, Rule-Based Explanations of Post-Hoc, Model Agnostic Methods

Understanding the inferences of data-driven, machine-learned models can be seen as a process that discloses the relationships between their input and output. These relationships consist and can be represented as a set of inference rules. However, the models usually do not explicit these rules to their end-users who, subsequently, perceive them as black-boxes and might not trust their predictions. Therefore, scholars have proposed several methods for extracting rules from data-driven machine-learned models to explain their logic. However, limited work exists on the evaluation and comparison of these methods. This study proposes a novel comparative approach to evaluate and compare the rulesets produced by five model-agnostic, post-hoc rule extractors by employing eight quantitative metrics. Eventually, the Friedman test was employed to check whether a method consistently performed better than the others, in terms of the selected metrics, and could be considered superior. Findings demonstrate that these metrics do not provide sufficient evidence to identify superior methods over the others. However, when used together, these metrics form a tool, applicable to every rule-extraction method and machine-learned models, that is, suitable to highlight the strengths and weaknesses of the rule-extractors in various applications in an objective and straightforward manner, without any human interventions. Thus, they are capable of successfully modelling distinctively aspects of explainability, providing to researchers and practitioners vital insights on what a model has learned during its training process and how it makes its predictions

From Anecdotal Evidence to Quantitative Evaluation Methods:A Systematic Review on Evaluating Explainable AI

The rising popularity of explainable artificial intelligence (XAI) to understand high-performing black boxes, also raised the question of how to evaluate explanations of machine learning (ML) models. While interpretability and explainability are often presented as a subjectively validated binary property, we consider it a multi-faceted concept. We identify 12 conceptual properties, such as Compactness and Correctness, that should be evaluated for comprehensively assessing the quality of an explanation. Our so-called Co-12 properties serve as categorization scheme for systematically reviewing the evaluation practice of more than 300 papers published in the last 7 years at major AI and ML conferences that introduce an XAI method. We find that 1 in 3 papers evaluate exclusively with anecdotal evidence, and 1 in 5 papers evaluate with users. We also contribute to the call for objective, quantifiable evaluation methods by presenting an extensive overview of quantitative XAI evaluation methods. This systematic collection of evaluation methods provides researchers and practitioners with concrete tools to thoroughly validate, benchmark and compare new and existing XAI methods. This also opens up opportunities to include quantitative metrics as optimization criteria during model training in order to optimize for accuracy and interpretability simultaneously.Comment: Link to website added: https://utwente-dmb.github.io/xai-papers

Explainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI): What we know and what is left to attain Trustworthy Artificial Intelligence

This work was supported by the National Research Foundation of Korea (NRF) grant funded by the Korea government (MSIT) (No. 2021R1A2C1011198) , (Institute for Information & communications Technology Planning & Evaluation) (IITP) grant funded by the Korea government (MSIT) under the ICT Creative Consilience Program (IITP-2021-2020-0-01821) , and AI Platform to Fully Adapt and Reflect Privacy-Policy Changes (No. 2022-0-00688).Artificial intelligence (AI) is currently being utilized in a wide range of sophisticated applications, but the outcomes of many AI models are challenging to comprehend and trust due to their black-box nature. Usually, it is essential to understand the reasoning behind an AI mode ľs decision-making. Thus, the need for eXplainable AI (XAI) methods for improving trust in AI models has arisen. XAI has become a popular research subject within the AI field in recent years. Existing survey papers have tackled the concepts of XAI, its general terms, and post-hoc explainability methods but there have not been any reviews that have looked at the assessment methods, available tools, XAI datasets, and other related aspects. Therefore, in this comprehensive study, we provide readers with an overview of the current research and trends in this rapidly emerging area with a case study example. The study starts by explaining the background of XAI, common definitions, and summarizing recently proposed techniques in XAI for supervised machine learning. The review divides XAI techniques into four axes using a hierarchical categorization system: (i) data explainability, (ii) model explainability, (iii) post-hoc explainability, and (iv) assessment of explanations. We also introduce available evaluation metrics as well as open-source packages and datasets with future research directions. Then, the significance of explainability in terms of legal demands, user viewpoints, and application orientation is outlined, termed as XAI concerns. This paper advocates for tailoring explanation content to specific user types. An examination of XAI techniques and evaluation was conducted by looking at 410 critical articles, published between January 2016 and October 2022, in reputed journals and using a wide range of research databases as a source of information. The article is aimed at XAI researchers who are interested in making their AI models more trustworthy, as well as towards researchers from other disciplines who are looking for effective XAI methods to complete tasks with confidence while communicating meaning from data.National Research Foundation of Korea Ministry of Science, ICT & Future Planning, Republic of Korea Ministry of Science & ICT (MSIT), Republic of Korea 2021R1A2C1011198Institute for Information amp; communications Technology Planning amp; Evaluation) (IITP) - Korea government (MSIT) under the ICT Creative Consilience Program IITP-2021-2020-0-01821AI Platform to Fully Adapt and Reflect Privacy-Policy Changes2022-0-0068

Brain Tumor Characterization Using Radiogenomics in Artificial Intelligence Framework

Brain tumor characterization (BTC) is the process of knowing the underlying cause of brain tumors and their characteristics through various approaches such as tumor segmentation, classification, detection, and risk analysis. The substantial brain tumor characterization includes the identification of the molecular signature of various useful genomes whose alteration causes the brain tumor. The radiomics approach uses the radiological image for disease characterization by extracting quantitative radiomics features in the artificial intelligence (AI) environment. However, when considering a higher level of disease characteristics such as genetic information and mutation status, the combined study of “radiomics and genomics” has been considered under the umbrella of “radiogenomics”. Furthermore, AI in a radiogenomics’ environment offers benefits/advantages such as the finalized outcome of personalized treatment and individualized medicine. The proposed study summarizes the brain tumor’s characterization in the prospect of an emerging field of research, i.e., radiomics and radiogenomics in an AI environment, with the help of statistical observation and risk-of-bias (RoB) analysis. The PRISMA search approach was used to find 121 relevant studies for the proposed review using IEEE, Google Scholar, PubMed, MDPI, and Scopus. Our findings indicate that both radiomics and radiogenomics have been successfully applied aggressively to several oncology applications with numerous advantages. Furthermore, under the AI paradigm, both the conventional and deep radiomics features have made an impact on the favorable outcomes of the radiogenomics approach of BTC. Furthermore, risk-of-bias (RoB) analysis offers a better understanding of the architectures with stronger benefits of AI by providing the bias involved in them