Explainable data-driven modeling via mixture of experts: towards effective blending of grey and black-box models
This work addresses the problem of interpretable modeling for domains requiring physical constraints, though it appears incremental in combining existing techniques.
The paper tackled the challenge of balancing accuracy and interpretability in modeling complex systems by proposing a mixture of experts framework that blends first-principle and machine learning models, resulting in an interpretable combination that closely resembles target phenomena as validated experimentally.
Traditional models grounded in first principles often struggle with accuracy as the system's complexity increases. Conversely, machine learning approaches, while powerful, face challenges in interpretability and in handling physical constraints. Efforts to combine these models often often stumble upon difficulties in finding a balance between accuracy and complexity. To address these issues, we propose a comprehensive framework based on a "mixture of experts" rationale. This approach enables the data-based fusion of diverse local models, leveraging the full potential of first-principle-based priors. Our solution allows independent training of experts, drawing on techniques from both machine learning and system identification, and it supports both collaborative and competitive learning paradigms. To enhance interpretability, we penalize abrupt variations in the expert's combination. Experimental results validate the effectiveness of our approach in producing an interpretable combination of models closely resembling the target phenomena.