Cross Feature Selection to Eliminate Spurious Interactions and Single Feature Dominance Explainable Boosting Machines

Interpretability is a crucial aspect of machine learning models that enables humans to understand and trust the decision-making process of these models. In many real-world applications, the interpretability of models is essential for legal, ethical, and practical reasons. For instance, in the banking domain, interpretability is critical for lenders and borrowers to understand the reasoning behind the acceptance or rejection of loan applications as per fair lending laws. However, achieving interpretability in machine learning models is challenging, especially for complex high-performance models. Hence Explainable Boosting Machines (EBMs) have been gaining popularity due to their interpretable and high-performance nature in various prediction tasks. However, these models can suffer from issues such as spurious interactions with redundant features and single-feature dominance across all interactions, which can affect the interpretability and reliability of the model's predictions. In this paper, we explore novel approaches to address these issues by utilizing alternate Cross-feature selection, ensemble features and model configuration alteration techniques. Our approach involves a multi-step feature selection procedure that selects a set of candidate features, ensemble features and then benchmark the same using the EBM model. We evaluate our method on three benchmark datasets and show that the alternate techniques outperform vanilla EBM methods, while providing better interpretability and feature selection stability, and improving the model's predictive performance. Moreover, we show that our approach can identify meaningful interactions and reduce the dominance of single features in the model's predictions, leading to more reliable and interpretable models. Index Terms- Interpretability, EBM's, ensemble, feature selection.

Meta-Embeddings for Natural Language Inference and Semantic Similarity tasks

Word Representations form the core component for almost all advanced Natural Language Processing (NLP) applications such as text mining, question-answering, and text summarization, etc. Over the last two decades, immense research is conducted to come up with one single model to solve all major NLP tasks. The major problem currently is that there are a plethora of choices for different NLP tasks. Thus for NLP practitioners, the task of choosing the right model to be used itself becomes a challenge. Thus combining multiple pre-trained word embeddings and forming meta embeddings has become a viable approach to improve tackle NLP tasks. Meta embedding learning is a process of producing a single word embedding from a given set of pre-trained input word embeddings. In this paper, we propose to use Meta Embedding derived from few State-of-the-Art (SOTA) models to efficiently tackle mainstream NLP tasks like classification, semantic relatedness, and text similarity. We have compared both ensemble and dynamic variants to identify an efficient approach. The results obtained show that even the best State-of-the-Art models can be bettered. Thus showing us that meta-embeddings can be used for several NLP tasks by harnessing the power of several individual representations.