Explainable Artificial Intelligence for Data Science on Customer Churn

Abstract

Machine learning, as a tool, has become critical for decision-making mechanisms in the modern world. It has applications in a wide range of areas, including finance, healthcare, justice, and transportation. Unfortunately, machine learning is often considered as a “black box”. As such, recommendations made by machine learning techniques, as well as the reasoning behind those recommendations, are not easily understood by humans. In this paper, we present an explainable artificial intelligence (XAI) solution that integrates and enhances state-of-the-art techniques to produce understandable and practical explanations to end-users. To evaluate the effectiveness of our XAI solution for data science, we conduct a case study on applying our solution to explaining a random forest-based predictive model on customer churn. Results show the practicality and usefulness of our XAI solution in practical applications such as data science on customer churn.