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How to Explain Individual Classification Decisions
After building a classifier with modern tools of machine learning we typically have a black box at hand that is able to predict well for unseen data. Thus, we get an answer to the question what is the most likely label of a given unseen data point. However, most methods will provide no answer why the model predicted a particular label for a single instance and what features were most influential for that particular instance. The only method that is currently able to provide such explanations are decision trees. This paper proposes a procedure which (based on a set of assumptions) allows to explain the decisions of any classification method.
@article{6670, title = {How to Explain Individual Classification Decisions}, journal = {Journal of Machine Learning Research}, abstract = {After building a classifier with modern tools of machine learning we typically have a black box at hand that is able to predict well for unseen data. Thus, we get an answer to the question what is the most likely label of a given unseen data point. However, most methods will provide no answer why the model predicted a particular label for a single instance and what features were most influential for that particular instance. The only method that is currently able to provide such explanations are decision trees. This paper proposes a procedure which (based on a set of assumptions) allows to explain the decisions of any classification method.}, volume = {11}, pages = {1803-1831}, organization = {Max-Planck-Gesellschaft}, school = {Biologische Kybernetik}, month = jun, year = {2010}, slug = {6670}, author = {Baehrens, D. and Schroeter, T. and Harmeling, S. and Kawanabe, M. and Hansen, K. and M{\"u}ller, K-R.}, month_numeric = {6} }