This paper shows that the law, in subtle ways, may set hitherto unrecognized incentives for the adoption of explainable machine learning applications. In doing so, we make two novel contributions. First, on the legal side, we show that to avoid liability, professional actors, such as doctors and managers, may soon be legally compelled to use explainable ML models. We argue that the importance of explainability reaches far beyond data protection law, and crucially influences questions of contractual and tort liability for (...) the use of ML models. To this effect, we conduct two legal case studies, in medical and corporate merger applications of ML. As a second contribution, we discuss the trade-off between accuracy and explainability and demonstrate the effect in a technical case study in the context of spam classification. (shrink)

The artificial intelligence models with machine learning that exhibit the best predictive accuracy, and therefore, the most powerful ones, are, paradoxically, those with the most opaque black-box architectures. At the same time, the unstoppable computerization of advanced industrial societies demands the use of these machines in a growing number of domains. The conjunction of both phenomena gives rise to a control problem on AI that in this paper we analyze by dividing the issue into two. First, we carry out an (...) epistemological examination of the AI’s opacity in light of the latest techniques to remedy it. And second, we evaluate the rationality of delegating tasks in opaque agents. (shrink)

Machine learning, deep learning and neural networks are extensively applied for the development of many fields. Though their technologies are improved greatly, they are often said to be opaque in terms of explainability. Their explainable neural functions will be essential to realization in the networks. In this paper, it is shown that the bio-inspired networks are useful for the explanation of tracking and classification of features. First, the asymmetric network with nonlinear functions is created based on the bio-inspired retinal network. (...) They have orthogonal properties useful for the tracking of features compared with the conventional symmetric networks, which is also proposed on the biological functions. Next, the analysis for the independence of the subspaces between the Fourier bases and the asymmetric network bases is performed. It was that the asymmetric networks have better performances in the classification compared with the symmetric ones. Further, the layered asymmetric networks generate the higher dimensional orthogonal bases that improve the classification accuracies by the replacements of bases. Finally, we classified Reuters collections data applying the explainable processing steps, which consist of the linear discriminations and the sparse coding with nearest neighbor relation for classification. (shrink)