Practical Automated Machine Learning on Azure

Chapter 7. Model Interpretability and Transparency with Automated ML

We discussed earlier how building good machine learning models is a pretty time-consuming process. What is a “good” machine learning model? We saw that this is usually defined by performance of the model, as measured by accuracy or similar metrics. As companies get ready to adopt machine learning for business-critical scenarios, interpretability and transparency of machine learning models becomes vital.

In this chapter, we cover key aspects around interpretability and transparency of machine learning that leads to customer trust. Interpretability and transparency become even more important when you are trying to use or customize a machine learning pipeline developed by others, including those generated by Automated Machine Learning systems. Let’s take a deeper look at how automated ML on Microsoft Azure Machine Learning enables model interpretability and transparency.

Model Interpretability

Most machine learning models are considered black boxes because it’s usually difficult to understand or explain how they work. Without this understanding, it is difficult to trust the model, and therefore difficult to convince executive stakeholders and customers of the business value of machine learning and machine learning–based systems.

Some models, like linear regression, are considered to be fairly straightforward and therefore easy to understand, but as we add more features or use more complicated machine learning models ...