Robustness of Explainable Artificial Intelligence in Industrial Process Modelling

eXplainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI) aims at providing understandable explanations of black box models. In this paper, we evaluate current XAI methods by scoring them based on ground truth simulations and sensitivity analysis. To this end, we used an Electric Arc Furnace (EAF) model to better understand the limits and robustness characteristics of XAI methods such as SHapley Additive exPlanations (SHAP), Local Interpretable Model-agnostic Explanations (LIME), as well as Averaged Local Effects (ALE) or Smooth Gradients (SG) in a highly topical setting. These XAI methods were applied to various types of black-box models and then scored based on their correctness compared to the ground-truth sensitivity of the data-generating processes using a novel scoring evaluation methodology over a range of simulated additive noise. The resulting evaluation shows that the capability of the Machine Learning (ML) models to capture the process accurately is, indeed, coupled with the correctness of the explainability of the underlying data-generating process. We furthermore show the differences between XAI methods in their ability to correctly predict the true sensitivity of the modeled industrial process.

Data Mining using Unguided Symbolic Regression on a Blast Furnace Dataset

In this paper a data mining approach for variable selection and knowledge extraction from datasets is presented. The approach is based on unguided symbolic regression (every variable present in the dataset is treated as the target variable in multiple regression runs) and a novel variable relevance metric for genetic programming. The relevance of each input variable is calculated and a model approximating the target variable is created. The genetic programming configurations with different target variables are executed multiple times to reduce stochastic effects and the aggregated results are displayed as a variable interaction network. This interaction network highlights important system components and implicit relations between the variables. The whole approach is tested on a blast furnace dataset, because of the complexity of the blast furnace and the many interrelations between the variables. Finally the achieved results are discussed with respect to existing knowledge about the blast furnace process.