Interpretation of Drop Size Predictions from a Random Forest Model Using Local Interpretable Model-Agnostic Explanations (LIME) in a Rotating Disc Contactor

Drop size is a crucial parameter for the efficient design and operation of the rotating disc contactor (RDC) in liquid–liquid extraction. The current work focuses on providing local and global explanations for the prediction of the drop size in a rotating disc contactor (RDC). The Random Forest (RF) regression model is a robust machine learning algorithm that can accurately capture complex relationships in the data. However, the interpretability of the model is limited. In order to address the issue of interpretability of the developed RF model, in the current work, we employed Local Interpretable Model-Agnostic Explanations (LIME) of the predictions of the RF model. This provides both local and global views of the model and thereby helps one to gain insights into the factors influencing predictions. We have provided local explanations depicting the impact of different attributes on the prediction of the output for any given input example. We have also obtained global feature importance, providing the top subset of informative attributes. We have also developed local surrogate models incorporating second order attribute interactions. This has provided important information about the effect of interactions on the drop size prediction. By augmenting the random forest model with LIME, it is possible to develop a more accurate and interpretable model for estimating the drop size in RDCs, ultimately leading to improved performance and efficiency.