BELLA: Black box model Explanations by Local Linear Approximations
Nedeljko Radulovic Albert Bifet Fabian Suchanek
In recent years, understanding the decision-making process of black-box
models has become not only a legal requirement but also an additional way to
assess their performance. However, the state of the art post-hoc interpretation
approaches rely on synthetic data generation. This introduces uncertainty and
can hurt the reliability of the interpretations. Furthermore, they tend to
produce explanations that apply to only very few data points. This makes the
explanations brittle and limited in scope. Finally, they provide scores that
have no direct verifiable meaning. In this paper, we present BELLA, a
deterministic model-agnostic post-hoc approach for explaining the individual
predictions of regression black-box models. BELLA provides explanations in the
form of a linear model trained in the feature space. Thus, its coefficients can
be used directly to compute the predicted value from the feature values.
Furthermore, BELLA maximizes the size of the neighborhood to which the linear
model applies, so that the explanations are accurate, simple, general, and
robust. BELLA can produce both factual and counterfactual explanations. Our
user study confirms the importance of the desiderata we optimize, and our
experiments show that BELLA outperforms the state-of-the-art approaches on
these desiderata.