Data-Centric Explanations: Explaining Training Data of Machine Learning Systems to Promote Transparency

Abstract

Training datasets fundamentally impact the performance of machine learning (ML) systems. Any biases introduced during training (implicit or explicit) are often reflected in the system’s behaviors leading to questions about fairness and loss of trust in the system. Yet, information on training data is rarely communicated to stakeholders. In this work, we explore the concept of data-centric explanations for ML systems that describe the training data to end-users. Through a formative study, we investigate the potential utility of such an approach, including the information about training data that participants find most compelling. In a second study, we investigate reactions to our explanations across four different system scenarios. Our results suggest that data-centric explanations have the potential to impact how users judge the trustworthiness of a system and to assist users in assessing fairness. We discuss the implications of our findings for designing explanations to support users’ perceptions of ML systems.

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Citation

Ariful Islam Anik and Andrea Bunt. 2021. Data-Centric Explanations: Explaining Training Data of Machine Learning Systems to Promote Transparency. In CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI’21), May 08–13, 2021, Yokohama, Japan. ACM, New York, NY, USA, 13 pages. https://doi.org/10.1145/3411764.3445736