bLIMEy: Surrogate Prediction Explanations Beyond LIME
This work addresses the need for flexible and transparent explainability tools in AI, particularly for researchers and practitioners, but it is incremental as it builds upon existing surrogate explainer concepts.
The paper tackles the problem of creating custom local surrogate explainers for black-box machine learning predictions by proposing a principled algorithmic framework, bLIMEy, which decomposes the process into modular components and includes LIME as a specific instance.
Surrogate explainers of black-box machine learning predictions are of paramount importance in the field of eXplainable Artificial Intelligence since they can be applied to any type of data (images, text and tabular), are model-agnostic and are post-hoc (i.e., can be retrofitted). The Local Interpretable Model-agnostic Explanations (LIME) algorithm is often mistakenly unified with a more general framework of surrogate explainers, which may lead to a belief that it is the solution to surrogate explainability. In this paper we empower the community to "build LIME yourself" (bLIMEy) by proposing a principled algorithmic framework for building custom local surrogate explainers of black-box model predictions, including LIME itself. To this end, we demonstrate how to decompose the surrogate explainers family into algorithmically independent and interoperable modules and discuss the influence of these component choices on the functional capabilities of the resulting explainer, using the example of LIME.