An Analysis of Local Explanation with LIME-RS

Abstract

Explainable Recommendation has attracted a lot of attention due to a renewed interest in explainable artificial intelligence. In particular, post-hoc approaches have proved to be the most easily applicable ones, since they treat as black boxes the increasingly complex recommendation models. Recent literature has shown that for post-hoc explanations based on local surrogate models, there are problems related to the robustness of the approach itself. This consideration becomes even more relevant in human-related tasks, from transparency or trustworthiness points of view – like recommendation. We show how the behavior of LIME-RS – a classical post-hoc model based on surrogates – is strongly model-dependent and does not prove to be accountable for the explanations generated.