GAM(e) changer or not? An evaluation of interpretable machine learning models based on additive model constraints

The number of information systems (IS) studies dealing with explainable artificial intelligence (XAI) is currently exploding as the field demands more transparency about the internal decision logic of machine learning (ML) models. However, most techniques subsumed under XAI provide post-hoc-analytical explanations, which have to be considered with caution as they only use approximations of the underlying ML model. Therefore, our paper investigates a series of intrinsically interpretable ML models and discusses their suitability for the IS community. More specifically, our focus is on advanced extensions of generalized additive models (GAM) in which predictors are modeled independently in a non-linear way to generate shape functions that can capture arbitrary patterns but remain fully interpretable. In our study, we evaluate the prediction qualities of five GAMs as compared to six traditional ML models and assess their visual outputs for model interpretability. On this basis, we investigate their merits and limitations and derive design implications for further improvements

A Light in the Dark: Deep Learning Practices for Industrial Computer Vision

In recent years, large pre-trained deep neural networks (DNNs) have revolutionized the field of computer vision (CV). Although these DNNs have been shown to be very well suited for general image recognition tasks, application in industry is often precluded for three reasons: 1) large pre-trained DNNs are built on hundreds of millions of parameters, making deployment on many devices impossible, 2) the underlying dataset for pre-training consists of general objects, while industrial cases often consist of very specific objects, such as structures on solar wafers, 3) potentially biased pre-trained DNNs raise legal issues for companies. As a remedy, we study neural networks for CV that we train from scratch. For this purpose, we use a real-world case from a solar wafer manufacturer. We find that our neural networks achieve similar performances as pre-trained DNNs, even though they consist of far fewer parameters and do not rely on third-party datasets