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Speaker "Sameer Singh" Details Back

 

Topic

"Why Should I Trust You?": Explaining the Predictions of any Classifier

Abstract

Despite widespread adoption, machine learning algorithms mostly remain black-boxes. Understanding the reasons behind predictions is, however, quite important in assessing trust, which is fundamental if one plans to take action based on a prediction, or when choosing whether to deploy a new model. Such understanding also provides insights into the model, which can be used to transform an untrustworthy model or prediction into a trustworthy one. In this talk, I will describe the LIME algorithm, an explanation technique that explains the predictions of ANY classifier in an interpretable and faithful manner, by learning an interpretable model locally around the prediction. We also propose a method to explain whole models by presenting representative explanations in a non-redundant way, framing the task as a submodular optimization problem. We demonstrate the flexibility of these methods by explaining different models for text (e.g. random forests) and image classification (e.g. neural networks). We show the utility of explanations via experiments with human subjects, on various scenarios that require trust: deciding if one should trust a prediction, choosing between two algorithms, improving an untrustworthy classifier, and characterizing exactly why a classifier should not be trusted. Work with Marco Tulio Ribeiro (University of Washington) and Carlos Guestrin (Apple/University of Washington)

Profile

Dr. Sameer Singh is an Assistant Professor of Computer Science at the University of California, Irvine. He is working on large-scale and interactive machine learning applied to natural language processing. Till recently, Sameer was a Postdoctoral Research Associate at the University of Washington, working with Carlos Guestrin. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst under the supervision of Andrew McCallum in 2014, during which he also interned at Microsoft Research, Google Research, and Yahoo! Labs on massive-scale machine learning. He was selected as a DARPA Riser, won the grand prize in the Yelp dataset challenge, has been awarded the Yahoo! Key Scientific Challenges and the UMass Graduate School fellowships, and was a finalist for the Facebook Ph.D. fellowship. Sameer has published more than 30 peer-reviewed papers in top-tier conferences and workshops.