2.1 Definition

There is no agreement about the definition of interpretability in the ML community [1], and many scholars do not differentiate interpretability and explainability [2]. [3] draw a clear boundary between interpretable and explainable ML: interpretable ML focuses on designing inherently interpretable models and explainable ML tries to provide post hoc explanations for existing black-box models. While [4] equates interpretability and explainability and define interpretability as the degree to which a human can understand the cause of a decision, [2] define interpretability as the degree to which a human can understand the cause of a decision and explainability as the degree to which a human can understand the cause of a decision and predict the model’s result. In addition, he adopts the definition of explanation as the post-hoc interpretability. Combining these definitions, we consider explainability as post-hoc interpretability, and adopts [4]’s definition of interpretability and explanation. As for interpretale machine learning, we refer to the definition by [5]: “extraction of relevant knowledge from a machine-learning model concerning relationships either contained in data or learned by the model”.

A daily example

References

[1]
Z. C. Lipton, “The mythos of model interpretability: In machine learning, the concept of interpretability is both important and slippery.” Queue, vol. 16, no. 3, pp. 31–57, 2018.
[2]
D. V. Carvalho, E. M. Pereira, and J. S. Cardoso, “Machine learning interpretability: A survey on methods and metrics,” Electronics, vol. 8, no. 8, p. 832, 2019.
[3]
C. Rudin, “Stop explaining black box machine learning models for high stakes decisions and use interpretable models instead,” Nature Machine Intelligence, vol. 1, no. 5, pp. 206–215, 2019.
[4]
T. Miller, “Explanation in artificial intelligence: Insights from the social sciences,” Artificial intelligence, vol. 267, pp. 1–38, 2019.
[5]
W. J. Murdoch, C. Singh, K. Kumbier, R. Abbasi-Asl, and B. Yu, “Definitions, methods, and applications in interpretable machine learning,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, vol. 116, no. 44, pp. 22071–22080, 2019.