Aggregation strategies to improve XAI for geoscience models that use correlated, high-dimensional rasters

Abstract

Abstract Complex machine learning architectures and high-dimensional gridded input data are increasingly used to develop high-performance geoscience models, but model complexity obfuscates their decision-making strategies. Understanding the learned patterns is useful for model improvement or scientific investigation, motivating research in eXplainable artificial intelligence (XAI) methods. XAI methods often struggle to produce meaningful explanations of correlated features. Gridded geospatial data tends to have extensive autocorrelation so it is difficult to obtain meaningful explanations of geoscience models. A recommendation is to group correlated features and explain those groups. This is becoming common when using XAI to explain tabular data. Here, we demonstrate that XAI algorithms are highly sensitive to the choice of how we group raster elements. We demonstrate that reliance on a single partition scheme yields misleading explanations. We propose comparing explanations from multiple grouping schemes to extract more accurate insights from XAI. We argue that each grouping scheme probes the model in a different way so that each asks a different question of the model. By analyzing where the explanations agree and disagree, we can learn information about the scale of the learned features. FogNet, a complex three-dimensional convolutional neural network for coastal fog prediction, is used as a case study for investigating the influence of feature grouping schemes on XAI. Our results demonstrate that careful consideration of how each grouping scheme probes the model is key to extracting insights and avoiding misleading interpretations.