The significant advances in autonomous systems together with an immensely wider application domain have increased the need for trustable intelligent systems. Explainable artificial intelligence is gaining considerable attention among researchers and developers to address this requirement. Although there is an increasing number of works on interpretable and transparent machine learning algorithms, they are mostly intended for the technical users. Explanations for the end-user have been neglected in many usable and practical applications. In this work, we present the Contextual Importance (CI) and Contextual Utility (CU) concepts to extract explanations that are easily understandable by experts as well as novice users. This method explains the prediction results without transforming the model into an interpretable one. We present an example of providing explanations for linear and non-linear models to demonstrate the generalizability of the method. CI and CU are numerical values that can be represented to the user in visuals and natural language form to justify actions and explain reasoning for individual instances, situations, and contexts. We show the utility of explanations in car selection example and Iris flower classification by presenting complete (i.e. the causes of an individual prediction) and contrastive explanation (i.e. contrasting instance against the instance of interest). The experimental results show the feasibility and validity of the provided explanation methods.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.