A Survey Of Methods For Explaining Black Box Models

In the last years many accurate decision support systems have been constructed as black boxes, that is as systems that hide their internal logic to the user. This lack of explanation constitutes both a practical and an ethical issue. The literature reports many approaches aimed at overcoming this crucial weakness sometimes at the cost of scarifying accuracy for interpretability. The applications in which black box decision systems can be used are various, and each approach is typically developed to provide a solution for a specific problem and, as a consequence, delineating explicitly or implicitly its own definition of interpretability and explanation. The aim of this paper is to provide a classification of the main problems addressed in the literature with respect to the notion of explanation and the type of black box system. Given a problem definition, a black box type, and a desired explanation this survey should help the researcher to find the proposals more useful for his own work. The proposed classification of approaches to open black box models should also be useful for putting the many research open questions in perspective.Comment: This work is currently under review on an international journa

An Enhanced Random Linear Oracle Ensemble Method using Feature Selection Approach based on Naïve Bayes Classifier

Random Linear Oracle (RLO) ensemble replaced each classifier with two mini-ensembles, allowing base classifiers to be trained using different data set, improving the variety of trained classifiers. Naïve Bayes (NB) classifier was chosen as the base classifier for this research due to its simplicity and computational inexpensive. Different feature selection algorithms are applied to RLO ensemble to investigate the effect of different sized data towards its performance. Experiments were carried out using 30 data sets from UCI repository, as well as 6 learning algorithms, namely NB classifier, RLO ensemble, RLO ensemble trained with Genetic Algorithm (GA) feature selection using accuracy of NB classifier as fitness function, RLO ensemble trained with GA feature selection using accuracy of RLO ensemble as fitness function, RLO ensemble trained with t-test feature selection, and RLO ensemble trained with Kruskal-Wallis test feature selection. The results showed that RLO ensemble could significantly improve the diversity of NB classifier in dealing with distinctively selected feature sets through its fusionselection paradigm. Consequently, feature selection algorithms could greatly benefit RLO ensemble, with properly selected number of features from filter approach, or GA natural selection from wrapper approach, it received great classification accuracy improvement, as well as growth in diversity