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arXiv · 2111.08749

SMACE: A New Method for the Interpretability of Composite Decision Systems

Gianluigi Lopardo·Damien Garreau·Frederic Precioso·Greger Ottosson
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Abstract

Interpretability is a pressing issue for decision systems. Many post hoc methods have been proposed to explain the predictions of a single machine learning model. However, business processes and decision systems are rarely centered around a unique model. These systems combine multiple models that produce key predictions, and then apply decision rules to generate the final decision. To explain such decisions, we propose the Semi-Model-Agnostic Contextual Explainer (SMACE), a new interpretability method that combines a geometric approach for decision rules with existing interpretability methods for machine learning models to generate an intuitive feature ranking tailored to the end user. We show that established model-agnostic approaches produce poor results on tabular data in this setting, in particular giving the same importance to several features, whereas SMACE can rank them in a meaningful way.

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Gianluigi Lopardo, Damien Garreau, Frederic Precioso, Greger Ottosson. 2022-07-04. SMACE: A New Method for the Interpretability of Composite Decision Systems. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-26387-3_20

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