Explainable AI in Industry

Artificial Intelligence is increasingly playing an integral role in determining our day-to-day experiences. Moreover, with proliferation of AI based solutions in areas such as hiring, lending, criminal justice, healthcare, and education, the resulting personal and professional implications of AI are far-reaching. The dominant role played by AI models in these domains has led to a growing concern regarding potential bias in these models, and a demand for model transparency and interpretability. In addition, model explainability is a prerequisite for building trust and adoption of AI systems in high stakes domains requiring reliability and safety such as healthcare and automated transportation, and critical industrial applications with significant economic implications such as predictive maintenance, exploration of natural resources, and climate change modeling. As a consequence, AI researchers and practitioners have focused their attention on explainable AI to help them better trust and understand models at scale. The challenges for the research community include (i) defining model explainability, (ii) formulating explainability tasks for understanding model behavior and developing solutions for these tasks, and finally (iii) designing measures for evaluating the performance of models in explainability tasks. In this tutorial, we will present an overview of model interpretability and explainability in AI, key regulations/laws, and techniques/tools for providing explainability as part of AI/ML systems. Then, we will focus on the application of explainability techniques in industry, wherein we present practical challenges/ guidelines for using explainability techniques effectively and lessons learned from deploying explainable models for several web-scale machine learning and data mining applications. We will present case studies across different companies, spanning application domains such as search and recommendation systems, sales, lending, and fraud detection. Finally, based on our experiences in industry, we will identify open problems and research directions for the data mining/machine learning community.