VIME: Visual Interactive Model Explorer for Identifying Capabilities and Limitations of Machine Learning Models for Sequential Decision-Making

Ensuring that Machine Learning (ML) models make correct and meaningful inferences is necessary for the broader adoption of such models into high-stakes decision-making scenarios. Thus, ML model engineers increasingly use eXplainable AI (XAI) tools to investigate the capabilities and limitations of their ML models before deployment. However, explaining sequential ML models, which make a series of decisions at each timestep, remains challenging. We present Visual Interactive Model Explorer (VIME), an XAI toolbox that enables ML model engineers to explain decisions of sequential models in different “what-if” scenarios. Our evaluation with 14 ML experts, who investigated two existing sequential ML models using VIME and a baseline XAI toolbox to explore “what-if” scenarios, showed that VIME made it easier to identify and explain instances when the models made wrong decisions compared to the baseline. Our work informs the design of future interactive XAI mechanisms for evaluating sequential ML-based decision support systems.