Towards Robust Interpretable Surrogates for Optimization
This work addresses the need for user-acceptable and interpretable optimization solutions in practical applications, though it appears incremental by combining existing concepts of interpretability and robustness.
The paper tackled the problem of creating interpretable and robust decision trees as surrogates for optimization processes under uncertainty, resulting in models and methods that were compared to existing frameworks.
An important factor in the practical implementation of optimization models is the acceptance by the intended users. This is influenced among other factors by the interpretability of the solution process. Decision rules that meet this requirement can be generated using the framework for inherently interpretable optimization models. In practice, there is often uncertainty about the parameters of an optimization problem. An established way to deal with this challenge is the concept of robust optimization. The goal of our work is to combine both concepts: to create decision trees as surrogates for the optimization process that are more robust to perturbations and still inherently interpretable. For this purpose we present suitable models based on different variants to model uncertainty, and solution methods. Furthermore, the applicability of heuristic methods to perform this task is evaluated. Both approaches are compared with the existing framework for inherently interpretable optimization models.