Extending Explainable Boosting Machines to Scientific Image Data

As the deployment of computer vision technology becomes increasingly common in applications of consequence such as medicine or science, the need for explanations of the system output has become a focus of great concern. Unfortunately, many state-of-the-art computer vision models are opaque, making their use challenging from an explanation standpoint, and current approaches to explaining these opaque models have stark limitations and have been the subject of serious criticism. In contrast, Explainable Boosting Machines (EBMs) are a class of models that are easy to interpret and achieve performance on par with the very best-performing models, however, to date EBMs have been limited solely to tabular data. Driven by the pressing need for interpretable models in science, we propose the use of EBMs for scientific image data. Inspired by an important application underpinning the development of quantum technologies, we apply EBMs to cold-atom soliton image data, and, in doing so, demonstrate EBMs for image data for the first time. To tabularize the image data we employ Gabor Wavelet Transform-based techniques that preserve the spatial structure of the data. We show that our approach provides better explanations than other state-of-the-art explainability methods for images.