"Why Should I Trust You?": Explaining the Predictions of Any Classifier

Introduction

Understanding why machine learning models behave the way they do empowers both system designers and end-users in many ways: in model selection, feature engineering, in order to trust and act upon the predictions, and in more intuitive user interfaces. Thus, interpretability has become a vital concern in machine learning, and work in the area of interpretable models has found renewed interest. In some applications, such models are as accurate as non-interpretable ones, and thus are preferred for their transparency. Even when they are not accurate, they may still be preferred when interpretability is of paramount importance. However, restricting machine learning to interpretable models is often a severe limitation. In this paper the authors argue for explaining machine learning predictions using model-agnostic approaches and propose LIME, a novel explanation technique that explains the predictions of any classifier in an interpretable and faithful manner, by learning an interpretable model locally around the prediction. They also propose a method to explain models by presenting representative individual predictions and their explanations in a non-redundant way, framing the task as a submodular optimization problem.

The authors demonstrate the flexibility of these methods by explaining different models for text (e.g. random forests) and image classification (e.g. neural networks). They show the utility of explanations via novel experiments, both simulated and with human subjects, on various scenarios that require trust: deciding if one should trust a prediction, choosing between models, improving an untrustworthy classifier, and identifying why a classifier should not be trusted.