From Machine Learning to Explainable AI

The success of statistical machine learning (ML) methods made the field of Artificial Intelligence (AI) so popular again, after the last AI winter. Meanwhile deep learning approaches even exceed human performance in particular tasks. However, such approaches have some disadvantages besides of needing big quality data, much computational power and engineering effort; those approaches are becoming increasingly opaque, and even if we understand the underlying mathematical principles of such models they still lack explicit declarative knowledge. For example, words are mapped to high-dimensional vectors, making them unintelligible to humans. What we need in the future are context-adaptive procedures, i.e. systems that construct contextual explanatory models for classes of real-world phenomena. This is the goal of explainable AI, which is not a new field; rather, the problem of explainability is as old as AI itself. While rule-based approaches of early AI were comprehensible “glass-box” approaches at least in narrow domains, their weakness was in dealing with uncertainties of the real world. Maybe one step further is in linking probabilistic learning methods with large knowledge representations (ontologies) and logical approaches, thus making results re-traceable, explainable and comprehensible on demand.