Contextual Explanations for Decision Support in Predictive Maintenance

Explainable artificial intelligence (XAI) methods aim to explain to the user on what basis the model makes decisions. Unfortunately, general-purpose approaches that are independent of the types of data, model used and the level of sophistication of the user are not always able to make model decisions more comprehensible. An example of such a problem, which is considered in this paper, is a predictive maintenance task where a model identifying outliers in time series is applied. Typical explanations of the model’s decisions, which present the importance of the attributes, are not sufficient to support the user for such a task. Within the framework of this work, a visualisation and analysis of the context of local explanations presenting attribute importance are proposed. Two types of context for explanations are considered: local and global. They extend the information provided by typical explanations and offer the user greater insight into the validity of the alarms triggered by the model. Evaluation of the proposed context was performed on two time series representations: basic and extended. For the extended representation, an aggregation of explanations was used to make them more intuitive for the user. The results show the usefulness of the proposed context, particularly for the basic data representation. However, for the extended representation, the aggregation of explanations used is sometimes insufficient to provide a clear explanatory context. Therefore, the explanation using simplification with a surrogate model on basic data representation was proposed as a solution. The obtained results can be valuable for developers of decision support systems for predictive maintenance.