Divorce Prediction with Machine Learning: Insights and LIME Interpretability

Divorce is one of the most common social issues in developed countries like in the United States. Almost 50% of the recent marriages turn into an involuntary divorce or separation. While it is evident that people vary to a different extent, and even over time, an incident like Divorce does not interrupt the individual's daily activities; still, Divorce has a severe effect on the individual's mental health, and personal life. Within the scope of this research, the divorce prediction was carried out by evaluating a dataset named by the 'divorce predictor dataset' to correctly classify between married and Divorce people using six different machine learning algorithms- Logistic Regression (LR), Linear Discriminant Analysis (LDA), K-Nearest Neighbors (KNN), Classification and Regression Trees (CART), Gaussian Na\"ive Bayes (NB), and, Support Vector Machines (SVM). Preliminary computational results show that algorithms such as SVM, KNN, and LDA, can perform that task with an accuracy of 98.57%. This work's additional novel contribution is the detailed and comprehensive explanation of prediction probabilities using Local Interpretable Model-Agnostic Explanations (LIME). Utilizing LIME to analyze test results illustrates the possibility of differentiating between divorced and married couples. Finally, we have developed a divorce predictor app considering ten most important features that potentially affect couples in making decisions in their divorce, such tools can be used by any one in order to identify their relationship condition.