Given key performance indicators collected with fine granularity as time series, our aim is to predict and explain failures in storage environments. Although explainable predictive modeling based on spiky telemetry data is key in many domains, current approaches cannot tackle this problem. Deep learning methods suitable for sequence modeling and learning temporal dependencies, such as RNNs, are effective, but opaque from an explainability perspective. Our approach first extracts the anomalous spikes from time series as events and then builds an RNN classifier with attention mechanisms to embed the irregularity and frequency of these events. A preliminary evaluation on real world storage environments shows that our approach can predict failures within a 3-day prediction window with comparable accuracy as traditional RNN-based classifiers. At the same time it can explain the predictions by returning the key anomalous events which led to those failure predictions.
@cite_8: Machine-learned classifiers are important components of many data mining and knowledge discovery systems. In several application domains, an explanation of the classifier's reasoning is critical for the classifier's acceptance by the end-user. We describe a framework, ExplainD, for explaining decisions made by classifiers that use additive evidence. ExplainD applies to many widely used classifiers, including linear discriminants and many additive models. We demonstrate our ExplainD framework using implementations of naive Bayes, linear support vector machine, and logistic regression classifiers on example applications. ExplainD uses a simple graphical explanation of the classification process to provide visualizations of the classifier decisions, visualization of the evidence for those decisions, the capability to speculate on the effect of changes to the data, and the capability, wherever possible, to drill down and audit the source of the evidence. We demonstrate the effectiveness of ExplainD in the context of a deployed web-based system (Proteome Analyst) and using a downloadable Python-based implementation.
@cite_9: 
@cite_6: The goal of Machine Learning to automatically learn from data, extract knowledge and to make decisions without any human intervention. Such automatic (aML) approaches show impressive success. Recent results even demonstrate intriguingly that deep learning applied for automatic classification of skin lesions is on par with the performance of dermatologists, yet outperforms the average. As human perception is inherently limited, such approaches can discover patterns, e.g. that two objects are similar, in arbitrarily high-dimensional spaces what no human is able to do. Humans can deal only with limited amounts of data, whilst big data is beneficial for aML; however, in health informatics, we are often confronted with a small number of data sets, where aML suffer of insufficient training samples and many problems are computationally hard. Here, interactive machine learning (iML) may be of help, where a human-in-the-loop contributes to reduce the complexity of NP-hard problems. A further motivation for iML is that standard black-box approaches lack transparency, hence do not foster trust and acceptance of ML among end-users. Rising legal and privacy aspects, e.g. with the new European General Data Protection Regulations, make black-box approaches difficult to use, because they often are not able to explain why a decision has been made. In this paper, we present some experiments to demonstrate the effectiveness of the human-in-the-loop approach, particularly in opening the black-box to a glass-box and thus enabling a human directly to interact with an learning algorithm. We selected the Ant Colony Optimization framework, and applied it on the Traveling Salesman Problem, which is a good example, due to its relevance for health informatics, e.g. for the study of protein folding. From studies of how humans extract so much from so little data, fundamental ML-research also may benefit.
@cite_24: One of the most important obstacles to deploying predictive models is the fact that humans do not understand and trust them. Knowing which variables are important in a model's prediction and how they are combined can be very powerful in helping people understand and trust automatic decision making systems. Here we propose interpretable decision sets, a framework for building predictive models that are highly accurate, yet also highly interpretable. Decision sets are sets of independent if-then rules. Because each rule can be applied independently, decision sets are simple, concise, and easily interpretable. We formalize decision set learning through an objective function that simultaneously optimizes accuracy and interpretability of the rules. In particular, our approach learns short, accurate, and non-overlapping rules that cover the whole feature space and pay attention to small but important classes. Moreover, we prove that our objective is a non-monotone submodular function, which we efficiently optimize to find a near-optimal set of rules. Experiments show that interpretable decision sets are as accurate at classification as state-of-the-art machine learning techniques. They are also three times smaller on average than rule-based models learned by other methods. Finally, results of a user study show that people are able to answer multiple-choice questions about the decision boundaries of interpretable decision sets and write descriptions of classes based on them faster and more accurately than with other rule-based models that were designed for interpretability. Overall, our framework provides a new approach to interpretable machine learning that balances accuracy, interpretability, and computational efficiency.
@cite_12: Standard generalized additive models (GAMs) usually model the dependent variable as a sum of univariate models. Although previous studies have shown that standard GAMs can be interpreted by users, their accuracy is significantly less than more complex models that permit interactions. In this paper, we suggest adding selected terms of interacting pairs of features to standard GAMs. The resulting models, which we call GA2 M $-models, for Generalized Additive Models plus Interactions, consist of univariate terms and a small number of pairwise interaction terms. Since these models only include one- and two-dimensional components, the components of GA2M-models can be visualized and interpreted by users. To explore the huge (quadratic) number of pairs of features, we develop a novel, computationally efficient method called FAST for ranking all possible pairs of features as candidates for inclusion into the model. In a large-scale empirical study, we show the effectiveness of FAST in ranking candidate pairs of features. In addition, we show the surprising result that GA2M-models have almost the same performance as the best full-complexity models on a number of real datasets. Thus this paper postulates that for many problems, GA2M-models can yield models that are both intelligible and accurate.
are interpretable by design @cite_6 . Typical examples include decision trees, decision sets @cite_24 @cite_9 , fuzzy inference models @cite_12 or additive models @cite_8 . However, none of these fit temporal data well.