Ride the Lightning

NIST is Pleased to Give You an Artificial Intelligence Brain Freeze

May 29, 2019

You know you're in trouble when you don't even understand the abstract of a document. The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) announced last week that a draft white paper is available for comment. The paper is called An Application of Combinatorial Methods for Explainability in Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning. I am not even sure I understand the title.

To quote from NIST: "This short paper introduces an approach to producing explanations or justifications of decisions made in some artificial intelligence and machine learning (AI/ML) systems, using methods derived from those for fault location in combinatorial testing. We show that validation and explainability issues are closely related to the problem of fault location in combinatorial testing, and that certain methods and tools developed for fault location can also be applied to this problem. This approach is particularly useful in classification problems, where the goal is to determine an object’s membership in a set based on its characteristics. We use a conceptually simple scheme to make it easy to justify classification decisions: identifying combinations of features that are present in members of the identified class but absent or rare in non-members. The method has been implemented in a prototype tool called ComXAI, and examples of its application are given. Examples from a range of application domains are included to show the utility of these methods."

Brain freeze yet?

The public comment period for this document ends on July 3, 2019 and you can download the white paper here.

Hat tip to Dave Ries.

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