# Towards Explainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI): A Data Mining Perspective

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2401.04374 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.04374/

## Key facts

- Cited by 9 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 137 of its 278 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 9 Jan 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 137)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [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)
- [XGBoost: A Scalable Tree Boosting System](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1603.02754/) (2016)
- ["Why Should I Trust You?": Explaining the Predictions of Any Classifier](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1602.04938/) (2016)
- [Learning Deep Features for Discriminative Localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.04150/) (2015)
- [Deep Inside Convolutional Networks: Visualising Image Classification Models and Saliency Maps](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1312.6034/) (2013)
- [Visualizing and Understanding Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1311.2901/) (2013)
- [Shortcut Learning in Deep Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.07780/) (2020)
- [Understanding Black-box Predictions via Influence Functions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.04730/) (2017)
- [Learning Important Features Through Propagating Activation Differences](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.02685/) (2017)
- [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)
- [SmoothGrad: removing noise by adding noise](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03825/) (2017)
- [A Survey Of Methods For Explaining Black Box Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.01933/) (2018)
- [Adversarial Examples Are Not Bugs, They Are Features](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.02175/) (2019)
- [Grad-CAM++: Improved Visual Explanations for Deep Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1710.11063/) (2017)
- [Analyzing Multi-Head Self-Attention: Specialized Heads Do the Heavy Lifting, the Rest Can Be Pruned](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.09418/) (2019)
- [Quantifying Attention Flow in Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.00928/) (2020)
- [This Looks Like That: Deep Learning for Interpretable Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1806.10574/) (2018)
- [Network Dissection: Quantifying Interpretability of Deep Visual Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.05796/) (2017)
- [An Empirical Study of Example Forgetting during Deep Neural Network Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.05159/) (2018)
- [Data Shapley: Equitable Valuation of Data for Machine Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.02868/) (2019)
- [Explaining Machine Learning Classifiers through Diverse Counterfactual Explanations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.07697/) (2019)
- [Score-CAM: Score-Weighted Visual Explanations for Convolutional Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.01279/) (2019)
- [Learning from Noisy Labels with Deep Neural Networks: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.08199/) (2020)
- [Estimating Training Data Influence by Tracing Gradient Descent](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.08484/) (2020)
- [Training Region-based Object Detectors with Online Hard Example Mining](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1604.03540/) (2016)
- [Deep Learning on a Data Diet: Finding Important Examples Early in Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.07075/) (2021)
- [What Neural Networks Memorize and Why: Discovering the Long Tail via Influence Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.03703/) (2020)

## Built on by (most cited first, 9 of 9)

- [When Search Engine Services meet Large Language Models: Visions and Challenges](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.00128/) (2024)
- [Computational Protein Science in the Era of Large Language Models (LLMs)](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.10282/) (2025)
- [Revisiting LRP: Positional Attribution as the Missing Ingredient for Transformer Explainability](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.02138/) (2025)
- [Interpretable Machine Learning for Weather and Climate Prediction: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.18864/) (2024)
- [Explaining Human Activity Recognition with SHAP: Validating Insights with Perturbation and Quantitative Measures](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.03714/) (2024)
- [Detecting labeling bias using influence functions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.19130/) (2026)
- [Pre-trained Graphformer-based Ranking at Web-scale Search (Extended Abstract)](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.16590/) (2024)
- [Generative Pre-trained Ranking Model with Over-parameterization at Web-Scale (Extended Abstract)](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.16594/) (2024)
- [Choose Your Explanation: A Comparison of SHAP and GradCAM in Human Activity Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.16003/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Given the complexity and lack of transparency in deep neural networks (DNNs), extensive efforts have been made to make these systems more interpretable or explain their behaviors in accessible terms. Unlike most reviews, which focus on algorithmic and model-centric perspectives, this work takes a "data-centric" view, examining how data collection, processing, and analysis contribute to explainable AI (XAI). We categorize existing work into three categories subject to their purposes: interpretations of deep models, referring to feature attributions and reasoning processes that correlate data points with model outputs; influences of training data, examining the impact of training data nuances, such as data valuation and sample anomalies, on decision-making processes; and insights of domain knowledge, discovering latent patterns and fostering new knowledge from data and models to advance social values and scientific discovery. Specifically, we distill XAI methodologies into data mining operations on training and testing data across modalities, such as images, text, and tabular data, as well as on training logs, checkpoints, models and other DNN behavior descriptors. In this way, our study offers a comprehensive, data-centric examination of XAI from a lens of data mining methods and applications.