Explaining by Imitating: Understanding Decisions by Interpretable Policy LearningDownload PDF

Published: 12 Jan 2021, Last Modified: 05 May 2023ICLR 2021 PosterReaders: Everyone
Keywords: interpretable policy learning, understanding decision-making
Abstract: Understanding human behavior from observed data is critical for transparency and accountability in decision-making. Consider real-world settings such as healthcare, in which modeling a decision-maker’s policy is challenging—with no access to underlying states, no knowledge of environment dynamics, and no allowance for live experimentation. We desire learning a data-driven representation of decision- making behavior that (1) inheres transparency by design, (2) accommodates partial observability, and (3) operates completely offline. To satisfy these key criteria, we propose a novel model-based Bayesian method for interpretable policy learning (“Interpole”) that jointly estimates an agent’s (possibly biased) belief-update process together with their (possibly suboptimal) belief-action mapping. Through experiments on both simulated and real-world data for the problem of Alzheimer’s disease diagnosis, we illustrate the potential of our approach as an investigative device for auditing, quantifying, and understanding human decision-making behavior.
One-sentence Summary: We present a method for learning interpretable representations of behavior to enable auditing, quantifying, and understanding human decision-making processes.
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Code: [![github](/images/github_icon.svg) vanderschaarlab/mlforhealthlabpub](https://github.com/vanderschaarlab/mlforhealthlabpub/tree/main/alg/interpole)
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