Abstract
The present paper aims to extract the inference mechanism of neural networks, supposed to be hidden in complicated surface phenomena, by maximizing information in terms of multiple selective constraints. For easy interpretation of the meaning of information content, information is represented in terms of selectivity of components, or selective potentiality. The selective potentiality represents an ability of neurons to respond selectively to inputs, and this selectivity should exclusively increase when going through different neurons. In addition, because the selectivity can be realized by increasing the strength of connection weights, we try to reduce this strength as much as possible, namely, cost minimization. The selectivity and cost are hierarchically applied as multiple constraints, disentangling complicated components to make the functions of neurons and connection weights as clear as possible, leading us to find the inner inference mechanism. The method was applied to the simple qualitative bankruptcy and more complicated bank marketing data sets, where the number of hidden layers increased to 15 to examine how multi-layered networks could be used to disentangle complicated components. Experimental results showed that the selective potentiality could disentangle connection weights and eventually produce linear and individual features for easy interpretation.























Similar content being viewed by others
Explore related subjects
Discover the latest articles, news and stories from top researchers in related subjects.References
Rai AE (2020) Explainable ai: From black box to glass box. J Acad Mark Sci 48(1):137–141
Pintelas E, Livieris IE, Pintelas P (2020) A grey-box ensemble model exploiting black-box accuracy and white-box intrinsic interpretability. Algorithms 13(1):17
Yang JH, Wright SN, Hamblin M, McCloskey D, Alcantar MA, Schrübbers L, Lopatkin AJ, Satish S, Nili A, Palsson BO et al (2019) A white-box machine learning approach for revealing antibiotic mechanisms of action. Cell 177(6):1649–1661
Varshney KR, Alemzadeh H (2017) On the safety of machine learning: Cyber-physical systems, decision sciences, and data products. Big Data 5(3):246–255
Rudin C (2019) Stop explaining black box machine learning models for high stakes decisions and use interpretable models instead. Nat Mach Intell 1(5):206–215
Atkinson K, Bench-Capon T, Bollegala D (2020) Explanation in ai and law: Past, present and future. Artif Intell pp 103387
Durán JM (2021) Dissecting scientific explanation in ai (sxai): A case for medicine and healthcare. Artif Intell 297:103498
Sendak M, Elish MC, Gao M, Futoma J, Ratliff W, Nichols M, Bedoya A, Balu S, O’Brien C (2020) The human body is a black box supporting clinical decision-making with deep learning. In: Proceedings of the 2020 Conference on fairness, accountability, and transparency, pp 99–109
Yu Z, Li T, Luo G, Fujita H, Yu N, Pan Y (2018) Convolutional networks with cross-layer neurons for image recognition. Inform Sci 433:241–254
Ribeiro MT, Singh S, Guestrin C (2016) Why should I trust you?: Explaining the predictions of any classifier. In: Proceedings of the 22nd ACM SIGKDD international conference on knowledge discovery and data mining. ACM, pp 1135–1144
Garreau D, Luxburg U (2020) Explaining the explainer: A first theoretical analysis of lime. In: International conference on artificial intelligence and statistics. PMLR, pp 1287–1296
Fong RC, Vedaldi A (2017) Interpretable explanations of black boxes by meaningful perturbation. In: Proceedings of the IEEE international conference on computer vision, pp 3429–3437
Nguyen A, Yosinski J, Clune J (2019) Understanding neural networks via feature visualization: A survey. In: Explainable AI: Interpreting, explaining and visualizing deep learning. Springer, pp 55–76
Bach S, Binder A, Montavon G, Klauschen F, Müller K-R, Samek W (2015) On pixel-wise explanations for non-linear classifier decisions by layer-wise relevance propagation. PLoS ONE 10 (7):e0130140
Montavon G, Binder A, Lapuschkin S, Samek W, Müller K-R (2019) Layer-wise relevance propagation: an overview. In: Explainable AI: interpreting, explaining and visualizing deep learning. Springer, pp 193–209
Hernandez-Orallo J (2019) Gazing into clever hans machines. Nat Machi Intell 1(4):172–173
Lapuschkin S, Wäldchen S, Binder A, Montavon G, Samek W, Müller K-R (2019) Unmasking clever hans predictors and assessing what machines really learn. Nat Commun 10(1):1–8
Carlini N, Wagner D (2017) Adversarial examples are not easily detected: Bypassing ten detection methods. In: Proceedings of the 10th ACM workshop on artificial intelligence and security, pp 3–14
Li C, Gao S, Deng C, Xie D, Liu W (2019) Cross-modal learning with adversarial samples. In: Advances in neural information processing systems, pp 10792–10802
Wen Y, Li S, Jia K (2020) Towards understanding the regularization of adversarial robustness on neural networks. In: International conference on machine learning. PMLR, pp 10225–10235
Kirkpatrick J, Pascanu R, Rabinowitz N, Veness J, Desjardins G, Rusu AA, Milan K, Quan J, Ramalho T, Grabska-Barwinska A et al (2017) Overcoming catastrophic forgetting in neural networks. Proc Natl Acad Sci 114(13):3521–3526
Hayes TL, Kafle K, Shrestha R, Acharya M, Kanan C (2020) Remind your neural network to prevent catastrophic forgetting. In: European conference on computer vision. Springer, pp 466–483
Chen X, Wang S, Fu B, Long M, Wang J (2019) Catastrophic forgetting meets negative transfer: Batch spectral shrinkage for safe transfer learning. In: Advances in neural information processing systems, pp 1908–1918
Linsker R (1988) Self-organization in a perceptual network. Computer 21(3):105–117
Linsker R (1989) How to generate ordered maps by maximizing the mutual information between input and output signals. Neural Comput 1(3):402–411
Linsker R (1992) Local synaptic learning rules suffice to maximize mutual information in a linear network. Neural Comput 4(5):691–702
Linsker R (1992) Local synaptic rules suffice to maximize mutual information in a linear network. Neural Comput 4:691–702
Linsker R (2005) Improved local learning rule for information maximization and related applications. Neural Netw 18(3):261–265
Jehee J, Roelfsema P, Deco G, Murre J, Lamme V (2007) Interactions between higher and lower visual areas improve shape selectivity of higher level neurons–explaining crowding phenomena. Brain Res 1157:167–176
Johnston WJ, Palmer SE, Freedman DJ (2020) Nonlinear mixed selectivity supports reliable neural computation. PLoS Comput Biol 16(2):e1007544
Peelen MV, Downing P (2020) Category selectivity in human visual cortex
Bongers BJ, IJzerman AP, Van Westen GJ (2020) Proteochemometrics–recent developments in bioactivity and selectivity modeling. Drug Disc Today Technol
Rafegas I, Vanrell M, Alexandre LA, Arias G (2020) Understanding trained cnns by indexing neuron selectivity. Pattern Recogn Lett 136:318–325
Ukita J (2020) Causal importance of low-level feature selectivity for generalization in image recognition. Neural Netw 125:185–193
Deco G, Finnof W, Zimmermann HG (1995) Unsupervised mutual information criterion for elimination of overtraining in supervised multiplayer networks. Neural Comput 7:86–107
Deco G, Parra L (1997) Non-feature extraction by redundancy reduction in an unsupervised stochastic neural networks. Neural Netw 10(4):683–691
Morcos AS, Barrett DG, Botvinick M, Rabinowitz NC (2018) On the importance of single directions for generalization
Rumelhart DE, Hinton GE, Williams R (1986) Learning internal representations by error propagation. In: Rumelhart DE, G E H et al (eds) Parallel distributed processing, vol 1. MIT Press, Cambridge, pp 318–362
Rumelhart DE, Zipser D (1986) Feature discovery by competitive learning. In: Rumelhart DE, G E H et al (eds) Parallel distributed processing, vol 1. MIT Press, Cambridge, pp 151–193
Rumelhart DE, McClelland JL (1986) On learning the past tenses of English verbs. In: Rumelhart DE, Hinton GE, Williams RJ (eds) Parallel distributed processing, vol 2. MIT Press, Cambrige, pp 216–271
Cheng X, Rao Z, Chen Y, Zhang Q (2020) Explaining knowledge distillation by quantifying the knowledge. In: Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF conference on computer vision and pattern recognition, pp 12925–12935
Mirzadeh SI, Farajtabar M, Li A, Levine N, Matsukawa A, Ghasemzadeh H (2020) Improved knowledge distillation via teacher assistant. In: Proceedings of the AAAI conference on artificial intelligence, vol 34, pp 5191–5198
Cheng Y, Wang D, Zhou P, Zhang T (2020) A survey of model compression and acceleration for deep neural networks
Gou J, Yu B, Maybank SJ, Tao D (2020) Knowledge distillation: A survey
Abramson N (1963) Information theory and coding. McGraw-Hill, New York
Kim M-J, Han I (2003) The discovery of experts’ decision rules from qualitative bankruptcy data using genetic algorithms. Expert Syst Appl 25(4):637–646
Moro S, Cortez P, Rita P (2014) A data-driven approach to predict the success of bank telemarketing. Decis Support Syst 62: 22–31
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Additional information
Publisher’s note
Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Kamimura, R. Multi-level selective potentiality maximization for interpreting multi-layered neural networks. Appl Intell 52, 13961–13986 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10489-021-02705-8
Accepted:
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10489-021-02705-8