Nick Bassiliades

Nikolaos Mylonas, Ioannis Mollas, Nick Bassiliades et al.

Multi-label classification is a challenging task, particularly in domains where the number of labels to be predicted is large. Deep neural networks are often effective at multi-label classification of images and textual data. When dealing with tabular data, however, conventional machine learning algorithms, such as tree ensembles, appear to outperform competition. Random forest, being a popular ensemble algorithm, has found use in a wide range of real-world problems. Such problems include fraud detection in the financial domain, crime hotspot detection in the legal sector, and in the biomedical field, disease probability prediction when patient records are accessible. Since they have an impact on people's lives, these domains usually require decision-making systems to be explainable. Random Forest falls short on this property, especially when a large number of tree predictors are used. This issue was addressed in a recent research named LionForests, regarding single label classification and regression. In this work, we adapt this technique to multi-label classification problems, by employing three different strategies regarding the labels that the explanation covers. Finally, we provide a set of qualitative and quantitative experiments to assess the efficacy of this approach.

Avraam Bardos, Ioannis Mollas, Nick Bassiliades et al.

Dimensionality reduction (DR) is a popular method for preparing and analyzing high-dimensional data. Reduced data representations are less computationally intensive and easier to manage and visualize, while retaining a significant percentage of their original information. Aside from these advantages, these reduced representations can be difficult or impossible to interpret in most circumstances, especially when the DR approach does not provide further information about which features of the original space led to their construction. This problem is addressed by Interpretable Machine Learning, a subfield of Explainable Artificial Intelligence that addresses the opacity of machine learning models. However, current research on Interpretable Machine Learning has been focused on supervised tasks, leaving unsupervised tasks like Dimensionality Reduction unexplored. In this paper, we introduce LXDR, a technique capable of providing local interpretations of the output of DR techniques. Experiment results and two LXDR use case examples are presented to evaluate its usefulness.

Ioannis Mollas, Nick Bassiliades, Grigorios Tsoumakas

Automated Machine Learning-based systems' integration into a wide range of tasks has expanded as a result of their performance and speed. Although there are numerous advantages to employing ML-based systems, if they are not interpretable, they should not be used in critical, high-risk applications where human lives are at risk. To address this issue, researchers and businesses have been focusing on finding ways to improve the interpretability of complex ML systems, and several such methods have been developed. Indeed, there are so many developed techniques that it is difficult for practitioners to choose the best among them for their applications, even when using evaluation metrics. As a result, the demand for a selection tool, a meta-explanation technique based on a high-quality evaluation metric, is apparent. In this paper, we present a local meta-explanation technique which builds on top of the truthfulness metric, which is a faithfulness-based metric. We demonstrate the effectiveness of both the technique and the metric by concretely defining all the concepts and through experimentation.

Ioannis Mollas, Nick Bassiliades, Grigorios Tsoumakas

Artificial Intelligence (AI) has a tremendous impact on the unexpected growth of technology in almost every aspect. AI-powered systems are monitoring and deciding about sensitive economic and societal issues. The future is towards automation, and it must not be prevented. However, this is a conflicting viewpoint for a lot of people, due to the fear of uncontrollable AI systems. This concern could be reasonable if it was originating from considerations associated with social issues, like gender-biased, or obscure decision-making systems. Explainable AI (XAI) is recently treated as a huge step towards reliable systems, enhancing the trust of people to AI. Interpretable machine learning (IML), a subfield of XAI, is also an urgent topic of research. This paper presents a small but significant contribution to the IML community, focusing on a local-based, neural-specific interpretation process applied to textual and time-series data. The proposed methodology introduces new approaches to the presentation of feature importance based interpretations, as well as the production of counterfactual words on textual datasets. Eventually, an improved evaluation metric is introduced for the assessment of interpretation techniques, which supports an extensive set of qualitative and quantitative experiments.

Ioannis Mollas, Nick Bassiliades, Grigorios Tsoumakas

In critical situations involving discrimination, gender inequality, economic damage, and even the possibility of casualties, machine learning models must be able to provide clear interpretations for their decisions. Otherwise, their obscure decision-making processes can lead to socioethical issues as they interfere with people's lives. In the aforementioned sectors, random forest algorithms strive, thus their ability to explain themselves is an obvious requirement. In this paper, we present LionForests, which relies on a preliminary work of ours. LionForests is a random forest-specific interpretation technique, which provides rules as explanations. It is applicable from binary classification tasks to multi-class classification and regression tasks, and it is supported by a stable theoretical background. Experimentation, including sensitivity analysis and comparison with state-of-the-art techniques, is also performed to demonstrate the efficacy of our contribution. Finally, we highlight a unique property of LionForests, called conclusiveness, that provides interpretation validity and distinguishes it from previous techniques.

Spyridon Paraschos, Ioannis Mollas, Nick Bassiliades et al.

The use of machine learning rapidly increases in high-risk scenarios where decisions are required, for example in healthcare or industrial monitoring equipment. In crucial situations, a model that can offer meaningful explanations of its decision-making is essential. In industrial facilities, the equipment's well-timed maintenance is vital to ensure continuous operation to prevent money loss. Using machine learning, predictive and prescriptive maintenance attempt to anticipate and prevent eventual system failures. This paper introduces a visualisation tool incorporating interpretations to display information derived from predictive maintenance models, trained on time-series data.

Ioannis Mollas, Nick Bassiliades, Grigorios Tsoumakas

Explainable AI is an emerging field providing solutions for acquiring insights into automated systems' rationale. It has been put on the AI map by suggesting ways to tackle key ethical and societal issues. Existing explanation techniques are often not comprehensible to the end user. Lack of evaluation and selection criteria also makes it difficult for the end user to choose the most suitable technique. In this study, we combine logic-based argumentation with Interpretable Machine Learning, introducing a preliminary meta-explanation methodology that identifies the truthful parts of feature importance oriented interpretations. This approach, in addition to being used as a meta-explanation technique, can be used as an evaluation or selection tool for multiple feature importance techniques. Experimentation strongly indicates that an ensemble of multiple interpretation techniques yields considerably more truthful explanations.

Filippos Gouidis, Alexandros Vassiliades, Theodore Patkos et al.

Object perception is a fundamental sub-field of Computer Vision, covering a multitude of individual areas and having contributed high-impact results. While Machine Learning has been traditionally applied to address related problems, recent works also seek ways to integrate knowledge engineering in order to expand the level of intelligence of the visual interpretation of objects, their properties and their relations with their environment. In this paper, we attempt a systematic investigation of how knowledge-based methods contribute to diverse object perception tasks. We review the latest achievements and identify prominent research directions.

Ioannis Mollas, Nick Bassiliades, Ioannis Vlahavas et al.

Towards a future where machine learning systems will integrate into every aspect of people's lives, researching methods to interpret such systems is necessary, instead of focusing exclusively on enhancing their performance. Enriching the trust between these systems and people will accelerate this integration process. Many medical and retail banking/finance applications use state-of-the-art machine learning techniques to predict certain aspects of new instances. Tree ensembles, like random forests, are widely acceptable solutions on these tasks, while at the same time they are avoided due to their black-box uninterpretable nature, creating an unreasonable paradox. In this paper, we provide a methodology for shedding light on the predictions of the misjudged family of tree ensemble algorithms. Using classic unsupervised learning techniques and an enhanced similarity metric, to wander among transparent trees inside a forest following breadcrumbs, the interpretable essence of tree ensembles arises. An interpretation provided by these systems using our approach, which we call "LionForests", can be a simple, comprehensive rule.

Nick Bassiliades

Semantic Web Rule Language (SWRL) combines OWL (Web Ontology Language) ontologies with Horn Logic rules of the Rule Markup Language (RuleML) family. Being supported by ontology editors, rule engines and ontology reasoners, it has become a very popular choice for developing rule-based applications on top of ontologies. However, SWRL is probably not go-ing to become a WWW Consortium standard, prohibiting industrial acceptance. On the other hand, SPIN (SPARQL Inferencing Notation) has become a de-facto industry standard to rep-resent SPARQL rules and constraints on Semantic Web models, building on the widespread acceptance of SPARQL (SPARQL Protocol and RDF Query Language). In this paper, we ar-gue that the life of existing SWRL rule-based ontology applications can be prolonged by con-verting them to SPIN. To this end, we have developed the SWRL2SPIN tool in Prolog that transforms SWRL rules into SPIN rules, considering the object-orientation of SPIN, i.e. linking rules to the appropriate ontology classes and optimizing them, as derived by analysing the rule conditions.

Thanos G. Stavropoulos, Stelios Andreadis, Nick Bassiliades et al.

This work aims to resolve issues related to Web Service retrieval, also known as Service Selection, Discovery or essentially Matching, in two directions. Firstly, a novel matching algorithm for SAWSDL is introduced. The algorithm is hybrid in nature, combining novel and known concepts, such as a logic-based strategy and syntactic text-similarity measures on semantic annotations and textual descriptions. A plugin for the S3 contest environment was developed, in order to position Tomaco amongst state-of-the-art in an objective, reproducible manner. Evaluation showed that Tomaco ranks high amongst state of the art, especially for early recall levels. Secondly, this work introduces the Tomaco web application, which aims to accelerate the wide-spread adoption of Semantic Web Service technologies and algorithms while targeting the lack of user-friendly applications in this field. Tomaco integrates a variety of configurable matching algorithms proposed in this paper. It, finally, allows discovery of both existing and user-contributed service collections and ontologies, serving also as a service registry.