# Robust Explainer Recommendation for Time Series Classification

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2306.05501 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.05501/

## Key facts

- Cited by 7 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 30 of its 65 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 8 Jun 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 30)

- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [Language Models are Few-Shot Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.14165/) (2020)
- [Explaining and Harnessing Adversarial Examples](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6572/) (2014)
- [Grad-CAM: Visual Explanations from Deep Networks via Gradient-based Localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1610.02391/) (2016)
- [A Unified Approach to Interpreting Model Predictions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1705.07874/) (2017)
- ["Why Should I Trust You?": Explaining the Predictions of Any Classifier](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1602.04938/) (2016)
- [Going Deeper with Convolutions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.4842/) (2014)
- [Axiomatic Attribution for Deep Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.01365/) (2017)
- [Learning Deep Features for Discriminative Localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.04150/) (2015)
- [Towards A Rigorous Science of Interpretable Machine Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1702.08608/) (2017)
- [Interpretability Beyond Feature Attribution: Quantitative Testing with Concept Activation Vectors (TCAV)](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.11279/) (2017)
- [Sanity Checks for Saliency Maps](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.03292/) (2018)
- [SmoothGrad: removing noise by adding noise](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03825/) (2017)
- [Striving for Simplicity: The All Convolutional Net](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6806/) (2014)
- [The Mythos of Model Interpretability](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.03490/) (2016)
- [Deep learning for time series classification: a review](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1809.04356/) (2018)
- [Captum: A unified and generic model interpretability library for PyTorch](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.07896/) (2020)
- [The UCR Time Series Archive](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.07758/) (2018)
- [ROCKET: Exceptionally fast and accurate time series classification using random convolutional kernels](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.13051/) (2019)
- [Benchmarking Deep Learning Interpretability in Time Series Predictions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.13924/) (2020)
- [Bake off redux: a review and experimental evaluation of recent time series classification algorithms](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.13029/) (2023)
- [Explaining Time Series Predictions with Dynamic Masks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.05303/) (2021)
- [Towards a Rigorous Evaluation of XAI Methods on Time Series](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.07082/) (2019)
- [Instance-based Counterfactual Explanations for Time Series Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.13211/) (2020)
- [Interpretable Time Series Classification using Linear Models and Multi-resolution Multi-domain Symbolic Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.01667/) (2020)
- [Temporal Dependencies in Feature Importance for Time Series Predictions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.14317/) (2021)
- [Accurate and interpretable evaluation of surgical skills from kinematic data using fully convolutional neural networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.07319/) (2019)
- [WEASEL 2.0 -- A Random Dilated Dictionary Transform for Fast, Accurate and Memory Constrained Time Series Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.10194/) (2023)
- [dCAM: Dimension-wise Class Activation Map for Explaining Multivariate Data Series Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.12165/) (2022)

## Built on by (most cited first, 7 of 7)

- [Improving the Evaluation and Actionability of Explanation Methods for Multivariate Time Series Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.12507/) (2024)
- [Class-Dependent Perturbation Effects in Evaluating Time Series Attributions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.17022/) (2025)
- [Evaluating Explanation Methods for Multivariate Time Series Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.15223/) (2023)
- [Why Do Class-Dependent Evaluation Effects Occur with Time Series Feature Attributions? A Synthetic Data Investigation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.11790/) (2025)
- [Toward Faithful Explanations in Acoustic Anomaly Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.12660/) (2026)
- [xaitimesynth: A Python Package for Evaluating Attribution Methods for Time Series with Synthetic Ground Truth](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.06781/) (2026)
- [Seeing Time: Visual-Temporal Representation Learning for Interpretable Time Series Clustering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.36873/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Time series classification is a task which deals with temporal sequences, a prevalent data type common in domains such as human activity recognition, sports analytics and general sensing. In this area, interest in explainability has been growing as explanation is key to understand the data and the model better. Recently, a great variety of techniques have been proposed and adapted for time series to provide explanation in the form of saliency maps, where the importance of each data point in the time series is quantified with a numerical value. However, the saliency maps can and often disagree, so it is unclear which one to use. This paper provides a novel framework to quantitatively evaluate and rank explanation methods for time series classification. We show how to robustly evaluate the informativeness of a given explanation method (i.e., relevance for the classification task), and how to compare explanations side-by-side. The goal is to recommend the best explainer for a given time series classification dataset. We propose AMEE, a Model-Agnostic Explanation Evaluation framework, for recommending saliency-based explanations for time series classification. In this approach, data perturbation is added to the input time series guided by each explanation. Our results show that perturbing discriminative parts of the time series leads to significant changes in classification accuracy, which can be used to evaluate each explanation. To be robust to different types of perturbations and different types of classifiers, we aggregate the accuracy loss across perturbations and classifiers. This novel approach allows us to recommend the best explainer among a set of different explainers, including random and oracle explainers. We provide a quantitative and qualitative analysis for synthetic datasets, a variety of timeseries datasets, as well as a real-world case study with known expert ground truth.