Applications of Formal Explanations in ML

Abstract: The most performant Machine Learning (ML) classifiers have been labeled black-boxes due to the complexity of their decision process. eXplainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI) methods aim to alleviate this issue by crafting an interpretable explanation for a models prediction. A drawback of most XAI methods is that they are heuristic with some drawbacks such as non determinism and locality. Formal Explanations (FE) have been proposed as a way to explain the decisions of classifiers by extracting a set of features that guarantee the prediction. In this thesis we explore these guarantees for different use cases: speeding up the inference speed of tree-based Machine Learning classifiers, curriculum learning using said classifiers and also reducing training data. We find that under the right circumstances we can achieve up to 6x speedup by partially compiling the model to a set of rules that are extracted using formal explainability methods.