Metric Ensembles Aid in Explainability: A Case Study with Wikipedia Data

In recent years, as machine learning models have become larger and more complex, it has become both more difficult and more important to be able to explain and interpret the results of those models, both to prevent model errors and to inspire confidence for end users of the model. As such, there has been a significant and growing interest in explainability in recent years as a highly desirable trait for a model to have. Similarly, there has been much recent attention on ensemble methods, which aim to aggregate results from multiple (often simple) models or metrics in order to outperform models that optimize for only a single metric. We argue that this latter issue can actually assist with the former: a model that optimizes for several metrics has some base level of explainability baked into the model, and this explainability can be leveraged not only for user confidence but to fine-tune the weights between the metrics themselves in an intuitive way. We demonstrate a case study of such a benefit, in which we obtain clear, explainable results based on an aggregate of five simple metrics of relevance, using Wikipedia data as a proxy for some large text-based recommendation problem. We demonstrate that not only can these metrics’ simplicity and multiplicity be leveraged for explainability, but in fact, that very explainability can lead to an intuitive fine-tuning process that improves the model itself.