Explaining Explanations: Axiomatic Feature Interactions for Deep Networks

Recent work has shown great promise in explaining neural network behavior. In particular, feature attribution methods explain which features were most important to a model's prediction on a given input. However, for many tasks, simply knowing which features were important to a model's prediction may not provide enough insight to understand model behavior. The interactions between features within the model may better help us understand not only the model, but also why certain features are more important than others. In this work we present Integrated Hessians, an extension of Integrated Gradients that explains pairwise feature interactions in neural networks. Integrated Hessians overcomes several theoretical limitations of previous methods to explain interactions, and unlike such previous methods is not limited to a specific architecture or class of neural network. We apply Integrated Hessians on a variety of neural networks trained on language data, biological data, astronomy data, and medical data and gain new insight into model behavior in each domain. Code available at https://github.com/suinleelab/path_explain