GLIME: A new graphical methodology for interpretable model-agnostic explanations

Explainable artificial intelligence (XAI) is an emerging new domain in which a set of processes and tools allow humans to better comprehend the decisions generated by black box models. However, most of the available XAI tools are often limited to simple explanations mainly quantifying the impact of individual features to the models' output. Therefore, human users are not able to understand how the features are related to each other to make predictions, whereas the inner workings of the trained models remain hidden. This paper contributes to the development of a novel graphical explainability tool that not only indicates the significant features of the model but also reveals the conditional relationships between features and the inference capturing both the direct and indirect impact of features to the models' decision. The proposed XAI methodology, termed as gLIME, provides graphical model-agnostic explanations either at the global (for the entire dataset) or the local scale (for specific data points). It relies on a combination of local interpretable model-agnostic explanations (LIME) with graphical least absolute shrinkage and selection operator (GLASSO) producing undirected Gaussian graphical models. Regularization is adopted to shrink small partial correlation coefficients to zero providing sparser and more interpretable graphical explanations. Two well-known classification datasets (BIOPSY and OAI) were selected to confirm the superiority of gLIME over LIME in terms of both robustness and consistency over multiple permutations. Specifically, gLIME accomplished increased stability over the two datasets with respect to features' importance (76%-96% compared to 52%-77% using LIME). gLIME demonstrates a unique potential to extend the functionality of the current state-of-the-art in XAI by providing informative graphically given explanations that could unlock black boxes.