A hybrid model involves the cooperation of an interpretable model and a complex black box. At inference, any input of the hybrid model is assigned to either its interpretable or complex component based on a gating mechanism. The advantages of such models over classical ones are two-fold: 1) They grant users precise control over the level of transparency of the system and 2) They can potentially perform better than a standalone black box since redirecting some of the inputs to an interpretable model implicitly acts as regularization. Still, despite their high potential, hybrid models remain under-studied in the interpretability/explainability literature. In this paper, we remedy this fact by presenting a thorough investigation of such models from three perspectives: Theory, Taxonomy, and Methods. First, we explore the theory behind the generalization of hybrid models from the Probably-Approximately-Correct (PAC) perspective. A consequence of our PAC guarantee is the existence of a sweet spot for the optimal transparency of the system. When such a sweet spot is attained, a hybrid model can potentially perform better than a standalone black box. Secondly, we provide a general taxonomy for the different ways of training hybrid models: the Post-Black-Box and Pre-Black-Box paradigms. These approaches differ in the order in which the interpretable and complex components are trained. We show where the state-of-the-art hybrid models Hybrid-Rule-Set and Companion-Rule-List fall in this taxonomy. Thirdly, we implement the two paradigms in a single method: HybridCORELS, which extends the CORELS algorithm to hybrid modeling. By leveraging CORELS, HybridCORELS provides a certificate of optimality of its interpretable component and precise control over transparency. We finally show empirically that HybridCORELS is competitive with existing hybrid models, and performs just as well as a standalone black box (or even better) while being partly transparent.
Through extensive experience developing and explaining machine learning (ML) applications for real-world domains, we have learned that ML models are only as interpretable as their features. Even simple, highly interpretable model types such as regression models can be difficult or impossible to understand if they use uninterpretable features. Different users, especially those using ML models for decision-making in their domains, may require different levels and types of feature interpretability. Furthermore, based on our experiences, we claim that the term "interpretable feature" is not specif…
Carnegie Mellon University（卡内基梅隆大学）；University of Washington（华盛顿大学）；Determined AI
Despite increasing interest in the field of Interpretable Machine Learning (IML), a significant gap persists between the technical objectives targeted by researchers' methods and the high-level goals of consumers' use cases. In this work, we synthesize foundational work on IML methods and evaluation into an actionable taxonomy. This taxonomy serves as a tool to conceptualize the gap between researchers and consumers, illustrated by the lack of connections between its methods and use cases components. It also provides the foundation from which we describe a three-step workflow to better enable …
Interpretable LLMs for Credit Risk: A Systematic Review and Taxonomy
School of Electronic Engineering and Computer Science, Queen Mary University of London（伦敦大学电子工程与计算机科学学院）；Institute for Data Science and Artificial Intelligence, Boğaziçi University（博雅大学数据科学与人工智能研究所）；College of Science Computer Science Department, Kuwait University（科威特大学科学学院计算机科学系）
Vision models are interpretable when they classify objects on the basis of features that a person can directly understand. Recently, methods relying on visual feature prototypes have been developed for this purpose. However, in contrast to how humans categorize objects, these approaches have not yet made use of any taxonomical organization of class labels. With such an approach, for instance, we may see why a chimpanzee is classified as a chimpanzee, but not why it was considered to be a primate or even an animal. In this work we introduce a model that uses hierarchically organized prototypes …
Xidian University（西安电子科技大学）；The University of Texas at Austin（德克萨斯大学奥斯汀分校）
Embedded topic models are able to learn interpretable topics even with large and heavy-tailed vocabularies. However, they generally hold the Euclidean embedding space assumption, leading to a basic limitation in capturing hierarchical relations. To this end, we present a novel framework that introduces hyperbolic embeddings to represent words and topics. With the tree-likeness property of hyperbolic space, the underlying semantic hierarchy among words and topics can be better exploited to mine more interpretable topics. Furthermore, due to the superiority of hyperbolic geometry in representing…
Tippie College of Business（蒂皮商学院）；University of Iowa（爱荷华大学）
Interpretable machine learning has become a strong competitor for traditional black-box models. However, the possible loss of the predictive performance for gaining interpretability is often inevitable, putting practitioners in a dilemma of choosing between high accuracy (black-box models) and interpretability (interpretable models). In this work, we propose a novel framework for building a Hybrid Predictive Model (HPM) that integrates an interpretable model with any black-box model to combine their strengths. The interpretable model substitutes the black-box model on a subset of data where th…
The unification of statistical (data-driven) and symbolic (knowledge-driven) methods is widely recognised as one of the key challenges of modern AI. Recent years have seen large number of publications on such hybrid neuro-symbolic AI systems. That rapidly growing literature is highly diverse and mostly empirical, and is lacking a unifying view of the large variety of these hybrid systems. In this paper we analyse a large body of recent literature and we propose a set of modular design patterns for such hybrid, neuro-symbolic systems. We are able to describe the architecture of a very large num…
Institute for Intelligent Systems（智能系统研究所）；University of Johannesburg（约翰内斯堡大学）
Meta-learning, decision fusion, hybrid models, and representation learning are topics of investigation with significant traction in time-series forecasting research. Of these two specific areas have shown state-of-the-art results in forecasting: hybrid meta-learning models such as Exponential Smoothing - Recurrent Neural Network (ES-RNN) and Neural Basis Expansion Analysis (N-BEATS) and feature-based stacking ensembles such as Feature-based FORecast Model Averaging (FFORMA). However, a unified taxonomy for model fusion and an empirical comparison of these hybrid and feature-based stacking ense…
Hybrid Gaussian Process Regression with Temporal Feature Extraction for Partially Interpretable Remaining Useful Life Interval Prediction in Aeroengine Prognostics
IBM Research Europe（IBM欧洲研究院）；Imperial College London（帝国理工学院）；Army Research Laboratory（美国陆军研究实验室）
Inductive Logic Programming (ILP) systems learn generalised, interpretable rules in a data-efficient manner utilising existing background knowledge. However, current ILP systems require training examples to be specified in a structured logical format. Neural networks learn from unstructured data, although their learned models may be difficult to interpret and are vulnerable to data perturbations at run-time. This paper introduces a hybrid neural-symbolic learning framework, called NSL, that learns interpretable rules from labelled unstructured data. NSL combines pre-trained neural networks for…
University of California San Diego（加州大学圣地亚哥分校）；Amazon（亚马逊）
We present a two-step hybrid reinforcement learning (RL) policy that is designed to generate interpretable and robust hierarchical policies on the RL problem with graph-based input. Unlike prior deep reinforcement learning policies parameterized by an end-to-end black-box graph neural network, our approach disentangles the decision-making process into two steps. The first step is a simplified classification problem that maps the graph input to an action group where all actions share a similar semantic meaning. The second step implements a sophisticated rule-miner that conducts explicit one-hop…
University of the Witwatersrand（金山大学）；University of Johannesburg（约翰内斯堡大学）
Hybrid methods have been shown to outperform pure statistical and pure deep learning methods at both forecasting tasks, and at quantifying the uncertainty associated with those forecasts (prediction intervals). One example is Multivariate Exponential Smoothing Long Short-Term Memory (MES-LSTM), a hybrid between a multivariate statistical forecasting model and a Recurrent Neural Network variant, Long Short-Term Memory. It has also been shown that a model that ($i$) produces accurate forecasts and ($ii$) is able to quantify the associated predictive uncertainty satisfactorily, can be successfull…
Hybrid Bernstein Normalizing Flows for Flexible Multivariate Density Regression with Interpretable Marginals
Institute for Applied Research HTWG - University of Applied Sciences（应用研究研究所 HTWG - 高等专业学院）；Chair of Statistics and Campus Institute Data Science (CIDAS) University of Göttingen（统计学教授及校园数据科学研究所 (CIDAS) 雷姆森大学）；Department of Statistics LMU Munich（统计学系 慕尼黑大学）；Munich Center for Machine Learning (MCML)（慕尼黑机器学习中心）
This work addresses the situation where a black-box model with good predictive performance is chosen over its interpretable competitors, and we show interpretability is still achievable in this case. Our solution is to find an interpretable substitute on a subset of data where the black-box model is overkill or nearly overkill while leaving the rest to the black-box. This transparency is obtained at minimal cost or no cost of the predictive performance. Under this framework, we develop a Hybrid Rule Sets (HyRS) model that uses decision rules to capture the subspace of data where the rules are …
A hybrid transformer and attention based recurrent neural network for robust and interpretable sentiment analysis of tweets
Khulna University of Engineering & Technology (KUET)（库尔纳工程技术大学）；Advanced Machine Intelligence Research (AMIR) Lab（高级机器智能研究实验室）；American International University-Bangladesh（孟加拉国美国国际大学）；Chowagiken Corp.（Chowagiken公司）；University of Asia Pacific（亚太大学）；University of Aizu（会津大学）
DAH-Net: A Dual-Attention Hybrid Network for Interpretable and Robust EEG-Based Emotion Recognition
Department of Electrical \& Computer Engineering University of Missouri Columbia, Missouri, USA；Department of Computer Science；Engineering City University Savar, Dhaka-1340, Bangladesh；Department of Computer Science University of Missouri Columbia, Missouri, USA
TA-RNN-Medical-Hybrid: A Time-Aware and Interpretable Framework for Mortality Risk Prediction
Department of Computer Engineering, SRC.,Islamic Azad university（计算机工程系，伊斯兰教Azad大学）；School of Computer Engineering, Iran university of Science and technology（计算机工程学院，伊朗科学技术大学）
Soybean Disease Detection via Interpretable Hybrid CNN-GNN: Integrating MobileNetV2 and GraphSAGE with Cross-Modal Attention
Biology Unit, Okinawa Institute of Science；Technology Graduate University, Okinawa 904-0412, Japan (e-mail: )；Thomas Lord Department of Computer Science, Viterbi School of Engineering, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA 90007, USA (e-mail: )；Department of Computer Science, American International University-Bangladesh, Dhaka 1229, Bangladesh (e-mail: , )；Department of Robotics；Automation, Multimedia University, Melaka, Malaysia (e-mail: )；Department of Computer Science \& Engineering, Techno International New Town, Kolkata 700156, India (e-mail: )
Hybrid Data-Driven SSM for Interpretable and Label-Free mmWave Channel Prediction
School of Science and Engineering, The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shenzhen（香港中文大学（深圳）理工学院）；Centre for Wireless Innovation (CWI), Queen’s University Belfast（贝尔法斯特女王大学无线创新中心）；National University of Singapore（新加坡国立大学）；Shenzhen Research Institute of Big Data（深圳大数据研究院）；City University of Hong Kong（香港城市大学）
University of Iowa（爱荷华大学）；Tippie College of Business, University of Iowa（爱荷华大学蒂皮商学院）
Driven by an increasing need for model interpretability, interpretable models have become strong competitors for black-box models in many real applications. In this paper, we propose a novel type of model where interpretable models compete and collaborate with black-box models. We present the Model-Agnostic Linear Competitors (MALC) for partially interpretable classification. MALC is a hybrid model that uses linear models to locally substitute any black-box model, capturing subspaces that are most likely to be in a class while leaving the rest of the data to the black-box. MALC brings together…
Berkeley Center for Cosmological Physics（伯克利宇宙物理中心）；Berkeley Institute for Data Science（伯克利数据科学研究所）；University of California, Berkeley（加州大学伯克利分校）；Department of Astrophysical Sciences（天体物理科学系）；Center for Statistics and Machine Learning（统计与机器学习中心）；Princeton University（普林斯顿大学）；LSST Project Management Office（大口径全天巡视望远镜项目管理办公室）
We present a Bayesian machine learning architecture that combines a physically motivated parametrization and an analytic error model for the likelihood with a deep generative model providing a powerful data-driven prior for complex signals. This combination yields an interpretable and differentiable generative model, allows the incorporation of prior knowledge, and can be utilized for observations with different data quality without having to retrain the deep network. We demonstrate our approach with an example of astronomical source separation in current imaging data, yielding a physical and …
Interpretable Physics-Informed Load Forecasting for U.S. Grid Resilience: SHAP-Guided Ensemble Validation in Hybrid Deep Learning Under Extreme Weather
1Dept. of Computer Science, Midwestern State University, Dallas, TX, USA 2O\&M Analytics, AES Clean Energy, The AES Corporation, Louisville, CO, USA 3Dept. of Information；Communication Engineering, Pabna University of Science
University of Alberta（阿尔伯塔大学）；IIT Kharagpur（印度理工学院卡拉格普尔分校）
The focus of this paper is a proof of concept, machine learning (ML) pipeline that extracts heart rate from pressure sensor data acquired on low-power edge devices. The ML pipeline consists an upsampler neural network, a signal quality classifier, and a 1D-convolutional neural network optimized for efficient and accurate heart rate estimation. The models were designed so the pipeline was less than 40 kB. Further, a hybrid pipeline consisting of the upsampler and classifier, followed by a peak detection algorithm was developed. The pipelines were deployed on ESP32 edge device and benchmarked ag…
Comparative Study of Neighbor-based Methods for Local Outlier Detection
School of Software, Shandong University（山东大学软件学院）；School of Mathematics and Computer, Shantou University（汕头大学数学与计算机学院）；School of Chemistry and Life Sciences, Suzhou University of Science and Technology（苏州科技大学化学与生命科学学院）
QAmplifyNet: Pushing the Boundaries of Supply Chain Backorder Prediction Using Interpretable Hybrid Quantum-Classical Neural Network
Khulna University of Engineering and Technology (KUET)（库尔纳工程技术大学（KUET））；American International University-Bangladesh (AIUB)（孟加拉国美国国际大学（AIUB））；The University of Aizu（会津大学）
