On Interpreting ML Models

This article deals with “What-if” analysis that allows experimentation with inputs to understand model behavior, transcending technical details. Detaching interpretation from model building leads to effective visualizations and overcomes the interpretability-accuracy trade-off.

Rahul S
3 min readJun 5, 2023
Photo by Gennady Zakharin on Unsplash

As ML technology has advanced, model interpretability has emerged as a significant challenge. Many practitioners believe highly complex black-box or deep learning (DL) models are inherently uninterpretable. This perceived dilemma has created a divide within the community, forcing users to choose between models that are interpretable but less accurate or models that are accurate but lack transparency.

Traditionally, statistical models have focused on interpreting models by building narratives around the model’s coefficients. In linear regression, for example, interpreting the model involves contextualizing the beta coefficients, while logistic regression relies on the “odds ratio” to construct a narrative.

One should read this to go a little deeper:

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