Individual Explanations in Machine Learning Models: A Case Study on Poverty Estimation
It addresses practical problems for machine learning practitioners in sensitive societal contexts, but is incremental as it builds on existing explanation methods.
The paper tackles the challenges of applying explanation methods in real-world machine learning scenarios, using poverty estimation as a case study, and presents strategies to mitigate these issues.
Machine learning methods are being increasingly applied in sensitive societal contexts, where decisions impact human lives. Hence it has become necessary to build capabilities for providing easily-interpretable explanations of models' predictions. Recently in academic literature, a vast number of explanations methods have been proposed. Unfortunately, to our knowledge, little has been documented about the challenges machine learning practitioners most often face when applying them in real-world scenarios. For example, a typical procedure such as feature engineering can make some methodologies no longer applicable. The present case study has two main objectives. First, to expose these challenges and how they affect the use of relevant and novel explanations methods. And second, to present a set of strategies that mitigate such challenges, as faced when implementing explanation methods in a relevant application domain -- poverty estimation and its use for prioritizing access to social policies.