Interpretability in Machine Learning: An Overview
This is a good exposition of some formal definitions for 'interpretability' in the context of machine learning, but I am still not really clear on why such a property is necessary or even desirable in the context of high dimensional statistical learning algorithms. In some sense the power of modern machine learning (as opposed to a set of heuristics + feature engineering + a linear classifier) is that it is not limited by what its designers are able to imagine or understand. If it were possible to give a simple explanation of how a high dimensional classifier works then it would also likely be unnecessary to have so many parameters.As an example, if we consider natural language processing, then we might say that we want our NLP algorithm to be interpretable. This is clearly a tall order since the study of linguistics is still full of unsolved riddles. It seems silly to insist that a computational model of language must be significantly easier to understand than language itself. If interpretability is not feasible with language - a construct that is intimately connecting to the faculties of the human brain - then why should we expect it to be feasible (or desirable for the wide range of applications that do not come naturally to people?