A Comparative Study of Two Rule-Based Explanation Methods for Diabetic Retinopathy Risk Assessment

Abstract

Understanding the reasons behind the decisions of complex intelligent systems is crucial in many domains, especially in healthcare. Local explanation models analyse a decision on a single instance, by using the responses of the system to the points in its neighbourhood to build a surrogate model. This work makes a comparative analysis of the local explanations provided by two rule-based explanation methods on RETIPROGRAM, a system based on a fuzzy random forest that analyses the health record of a diabetic person to assess his/her degree of risk of developing diabetic retinopathy. The analysed explanation methods are C-LORE-F (a variant of LORE that builds a decision tree) and DRSA (a method based on rough sets that builds a set of rules). The explored methods gave good results in several metrics, although there is room for improvement in the generation of counterfactual examples.