Using model explanations to guide deep learning models towards consistent explanations for EHR data

Abstract

It has been shown that identical deep learning (DL) architectures will produce distinct explanations when trained with different hyperparameters that are orthogonal to the task (e.g. random seed, training set order). In domains such as healthcare and finance, where transparency and explainability is paramount, this can be a significant barrier to DL adoption. In this study we present a further analysis of explanation (in)consistency on 6 tabular datasets/tasks, with a focus on Electronic Health Records data. We propose a novel deep learning ensemble architecture that trains its sub-models to produce consistent explanations, improving explanation consistency by as much as 315% (e.g. from 0.02433 to 0.1011 on MIMIC-IV), and on average by 124% (e.g. from 0.12282 to 0.4450 on the BCW dataset). We evaluate the effectiveness of our proposed technique and discuss the implications our results have for both industrial applications of DL and explainability as well as future methodological work.