Principles and Practice of Explainable Machine Learning
Artificial intelligence (AI) provides many opportunities to improve private
and public life. Discovering patterns and structures in large troves of data in
an automated manner is a core component of data science, and currently drives
applications in diverse areas such as computational biology, law and finance.
However, such a highly positive impact is coupled with significant challenges:
how do we understand the decisions suggested by these systems in order that we
can trust them? In this report, we focus specifically on data-driven methods --
machine learning (ML) and pattern recognition models in particular -- so as to
survey and distill the results and observations from the literature. The
purpose of this report can be especially appreciated by noting that ML models
are increasingly deployed in a wide range of businesses. However, with the
increasing prevalence and complexity of methods, business stakeholders in the
very least have a growing number of concerns about the drawbacks of models,
data-specific biases, and so on. Analogously, data science practitioners are
often not aware about approaches emerging from the academic literature, or may
struggle to appreciate the differences between different methods, so end up
using industry standards such as SHAP. Here, we have undertaken a survey to
help industry practitioners (but also data scientists more broadly) understand
the field of explainable machine learning better and apply the right tools. Our
latter sections build a narrative around a putative data scientist, and discuss
how she might go about explaining her models by asking the right questions.