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Explanation Explorer

The Explanation Explorer is a visual interface to explore similarly explained data items. Having a trained machine learning model it is possible to create explanations for data items by probing model inputs. The visual analytics interface groups similar explanations together and provides an interactive way of exploring the significants and quantity of those explanations in a given data set, i.e., a validation data set.

You can find a live demo here which uses an example data set below.

Overview of the Explanation Explorer

Publications

A Workflow for Visual Diagnostics of Binary Classifiers using Instance-Level Explanations; Josua Krause, Aritra Dasgupta, Jordan Swartz, Yindalon Aphinyanaphongs, Enrico Bertini; Published at IEEE VAST 2017. [slides] [talk] [video]

Getting started

The project consists of a python server with a web front-end. To get started clone the repository and run:

git submodule update --init --recursive
pip install -r requirements.txt

After that the project is ready to run.

./server.py input.csv expl.json

where input.csv and expl.json are files as described below or as created with create_explanations.py. Once the server is started navigate to the URL as prompted in the server output.

Run ./server.py -h to get a list of all input arguments.

Creating explanations

In order to create explanations you can implement a subclass of the Model class in defs.py. Then you can call create_explanations.py with:

./create_explanations.py yourfile YourModel output

where yourfile is a relative python module path (ie., yourfile.py is a file in the current folder) which contains the definition of YourModel which is a subclass of defs.Model. output is the folder where the two output files (the input to ./server.py) are written to.

./create_explanations.py uses an adaption of the LIME algorithm by default.

Airbnb

example_airbnb.py contains an example implementation for a text data set (whether a place has good ratings based on its description -- you can find the jupyter notebook that was used for creating the data set in example/airbnb/) and can be used like this:

./create_explanations.py example_airbnb AirbnbModel output

And the server can then be started via:

./server.py output/airbnbmodel.csr output/airbnbmodel.lime.json

Mushrooms

example_mushroom.py contains an example implementation for a categorical data set (whether mushrooms are edible given certain physical features) and can be used like this:

./create_explanations.py example_mushroom MushroomModel output

And the server can then be started via:

./server.py output/mushroommodel.csv output/mushroommodel.lime.json

Input format

As of now the project requires two input files. The input data and the explanation description.

The input data has to be a CSV file representing a binary data matrix. The first row contains the column names. There is one special columns label (containing the ground truth label 0 or 1) and the file should only contain rows of the validation data set. Optionally, the input data can be stored as CSR file (*.csr) which is a CSV file where the first row is label followed by the feature names and the following rows contain the label as first element and then the indices of the features that are 1 (the data has to be binary for that).

The explanation description is a JSON file of the following format:

{
  "test_auc": 0.85, // area under ROC curve for the explained set
  "train_auc": 0.9, // area under ROC curve for the training set
  "total_rows": 135, // number of rows in the input data that belong to the explained set (used for integrity check)
  "total_true": 71, // number of rows with a `1` label in the input data that belong to the explained set (used for integrity check)
  "threshold": 0.6, // the optimal threshold minimizing incorrectly predicted training instances
  "features": [ "foo", "bar", ... ], // names of the features corresponding to the input data
  "expls": [ // array of explanations for each data item in order of the ixs array
    {
      "ix": 0, // the index of the current item starting at 0
      "label": 0, // the ground truth label 0 or 1
      "pred": 0.1, // prediction score
      "pred_label": 0, // the predicted label 0 or 1 using the threshold from above (used for integrity check)
      "expl": [ // the explanation
        [ 12, "+" ], // one step: feature index in features array, feature prefix (can be "")
        // ...
      ],
      "postfixes": [ // postfixes to put after feature names -- corresponds to the features array
        "=[0, 10)",
        "=5",
        "", // empty string if no postfix should be added
        None, // ignore feature when listing
        // ...
      ],
    },
    // ...
  ],
}

Older formats

Using --protocol 0 as additional command line argument enables using the legacy format. Here, the CSV file has an additional column pred (containing the prediction score of the current row between 0.0 and 1.0). Also, ideally, the file should contain both rows of the training data set (optional) and validation data set (needed).

The explanation description is a JSON file of the following format:

{
  "auc": 0.85, // area under ROC curve for the explained set
  "train_auc": 0.9, // area under ROC curve for the training set
  "ixs": [ 0, 1, 2, ... ], // indices of rows in the input data that belong to the explained set
  "train_ixs": [ 135, 136, 137, ... ], // indices of rows in the input data that belong to the training set
  "total_features": 1400, // number of features (used for integrity check)
  "total_rows": 135, // number of rows in the input data that belong to the explained set (used for integrity check)
  "total_true": 71, // number of rows with a `1` label in the input data that belong to the explained set (used for integrity check)
  "train_preds": [ 0.2, 0.113, ... ], // prediction scores for training data in order of the train_ixs array
  "features": [ "foo", "bar", ... ], // names of the features corresponding to the input data
  "expls": [ // array of explanations for each data item in order of the ixs array
    {
      "file": null, // unused
      "meta": "", // unused
      "ix": 0, // the index of the current item (must correspond to the ixs array)
      "label": 0, // the ground truth label 0 or 1
      "pred": 0.1, // prediction score
      "down": [ // removing features (aka. setting features to 0) to reduce the prediction score
        [ 12, 0.09, [] ], // one step: feature index in features array, new prediction score, re-addable feature list
        // ...
      ],
      "up": [ // removing features to increase the prediction score
        [ 24, 0.11, [] ], // one step: feature index in features array, new prediction score, re-addable feature list
        // ...
      ],
    },
    // ...
  ],
}