Responsible Data Science Lab at Purdue

Algorithmic decision-making systems are successfully being adopted in a wide range of domains for diverse tasks. While the potential benefits of algorithmic decision-making are many, the importance of trusting these systems has only recently attracted attention. There is growing concern that these systems are complex, opaque and non-intuitive, and hence are difficult to trust. There has been a recent resurgence of interest in explainable artificial intelligence (XAI) that aims to reduce the opacity of a model by explaining its behavior, its predictions or both, thus allowing humans to scrutinize and trust the model. A host of technical advances have been made and several explanation methods have been proposed in recent years that address the problem of model explainability and transparency. In this tutorial, we will present these novel explanation approaches, characterize their strengths and limitations, position existing work with respect to the database (DB) community, and enumerate opportunities for data management research in the context of XAI.

A wide variety of fairness metrics and eXplainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI) approaches have been proposed in the literature to identify bias in machine learning models that are used in critical real-life contexts. However, merely reporting on a model’s bias or generating explanations using existing XAI techniques is insufficient to locate and eventually mitigate sources of bias. We introduce Gopher, a system that produces compact, interpretable, and causal explanations for bias or unexpected model behavior by identifying coherent subsets of the training data that are root-causes for this behavior. Specifically, we introduce the concept ofcausal responsibility that quantifies the extent to which intervening on training data by removing or updating subsets of it can resolve the bias. Building on this concept, we develop an efficient approach for generating the top-𝑘 patterns that explain model bias by utilizing techniques from the machine learning (ML) community to approximate causal responsibility, and using pruning rules to manage the large search space for patterns. Our experimental evaluation demonstrates the effectiveness of Gopher in generating interpretable explanations for identifying and debugging sources of bias.

There has been a recent resurgence of interest in explainable arti!cial intelligence (XAI) that aims to reduce the opaqueness of AI-based decision-making systems, allowing humans to scrutinize and trust them. Prior work in this context has focused on the attribution of responsibility for an algorithm’s decisions to its inputs wherein responsibility is typically approached as a purely associational concept. In this paper, we propose a principled causalitybased approach for explaining black-box decision-making systems that addresses limitations of existing methods in XAI. At the core of our framework lies probabilistic contrastive counterfactuals, a concept that can be traced back to philosophical, cognitive, and social foundations of theories on how humans generate and select explanations. We show how such counterfactuals can quantify the direct and indirect in!uences of a variable on decisions made by an algorithm, and provide actionable recourse for individuals negatively affected by the algorithm’s decision. Unlike prior work, our system, Lewis: (1) can compute provably effective explanations and recourse at local, global and contextual levels; (2) is designed to work with users with varying levels of background knowledge of the underlying causal model; and (3) makes no assumptions about the internals of an algorithmic system except for the availability of its input-output data. We empirically evaluate Lewis on four realworld datasets and show that it generates human-understandable explanations that improve upon state-of-the-art approaches in XAI, including the popular LIME and SHAP. Experiments on synthetic data further demonstrate the correctness of Lewis’s explanations and the scalability of its recourse algorithm.