Cited by 109Explainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI)Ethics and Social Impacts of AISafety Systems Engineering in Autonomy

Designing a feature selection method based on explainable artificial intelligence

Open access
Zacharias, Jan, von Zahn, Moritz, Chen, Johannes, Hinz, Oliver·2022·Electronic Markets

Abstract

Nowadays, artificial intelligence (AI) systems make predictions in numerous high stakes domains, including credit-risk assessment and medical diagnostics. Consequently, AI systems increasingly affect humans, yet many state-of-the-art systems lack transparency and thus, deny the individual’s “right to explanation”. As a remedy, researchers and practitioners have developed explainable AI, which provides reasoning on how AI systems infer individual predictions. However, with recent legal initiatives demanding comprehensive explainability throughout the (development of an) AI system, we argue that the pre-processing stage has been unjustifiably neglected and should receive greater attention in current efforts to establish explainability. In this paper, we focus on introducing explainability to an integral part of the pre-processing stage: feature selection. Specifically, we build upon design science research to develop a design framework for explainable feature selection. We instantiate the design framework in a running software artifact and evaluate it in two focus group sessions. Our artifact helps organizations to persuasively justify feature selection to stakeholders and, thus, comply with upcoming AI legislation. We further provide researchers and practitioners with a design framework consisting of meta-requirements and design principles for explainable feature selection.

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  1. Benavoli, A., Corani, G., Mangili, F., Zaffalon, M., & Ruggeri, F. (2014). A Bayesian Wilcoxon signed-rank test based on the Dir- ichlet process. International conference on machine learning (pp. 1026-1034). PMLR.
  2. Mlambo, N., Cheruiyot, W. K., & Kimwele, M. W. (2016). A survey and comparative study of filter and wrapper feature selection tech- niques. International Journal of Engineering and Science (IJES), 5(8), 57-67.
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Authors
Zacharias, J., von Zahn, M., Chen, J., & Hinz, O.
Affiliations
Goethe University Frankfurt (DE)
Corresponding author
Zacharias, Jan
Venue
Electronic Markets
Published
2022-12
Volume
32
Issue
4
Pages
2159-2184
ISSN
  • 1019-6781 (ISSN-L)
  • 1422-8890
OpenAlex
W4312132544
Cited by
109
References
91
Citations by year
2026: 28 · 2025: 31 · 2024: 31 · 2023: 18 · 2022: 1
FWCI
6.66
Type
journal article
Language
en
Open access
Locations
  • Electronic Markets (publishedVersion, cc-by)
  • RePEc: Research Papers in Economics (submittedVersion)
  • Econstor (Econstor) (submittedVersion, cc-by)
  • Publication Server of Goethe University Frankfurt am Main (Goethe University Frankfurt) (submittedVersion, cc-by)
Funders
Johann Wolfgang Goethe-Universität, Frankfurt am Main
Topics
  • Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Artificial Intelligence › Explainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI)
  • Social Sciences › Safety Research › Ethics and Social Impacts of AI
  • Physical Sciences › Engineering › Safety, Risk, Reliability and Quality › Safety Systems Engineering in Autonomy
Keywords
explainable AI, feature selection, right to explanation, AI transparency, design framework, meta-requirements, design principles, credit risk assessment, medical diagnostics

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