NIMO: a Nonlinear Interpretable MOdel

Fuente: arXiv
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Autores principales: Xu, Shijian, Negri, Marcello Massimo, Roth, Volker
Formato: Preprint
Publicado: 2025
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author Xu, Shijian
Negri, Marcello Massimo
Roth, Volker
author_facet Xu, Shijian
Negri, Marcello Massimo
Roth, Volker
contents Deep learning has achieved remarkable success across many domains, but it has also created a growing demand for interpretability in model predictions. Although many explainable machine learning methods have been proposed, post-hoc explanations lack guaranteed fidelity and are sensitive to hyperparameter choices, highlighting the appeal of inherently interpretable models. For example, linear regression provides clear feature effects through its coefficients. However, such models are often outperformed by more complex neural networks (NNs) that usually lack inherent interpretability. To address this dilemma, we introduce NIMO, a framework that combines inherent interpretability with the expressive power of neural networks. Building on the simple linear regression, NIMO is able to provide flexible and intelligible feature effects. Relevantly, we develop an optimization method based on parameter elimination, that allows for optimizing the NN parameters and linear coefficients effectively and efficiently. By relying on adaptive ridge regression we can easily incorporate sparsity as well. We show empirically that our model can provide faithful and intelligible feature effects while maintaining good predictive performance.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2506_05059
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle NIMO: a Nonlinear Interpretable MOdel
Xu, Shijian
Negri, Marcello Massimo
Roth, Volker
Machine Learning
Deep learning has achieved remarkable success across many domains, but it has also created a growing demand for interpretability in model predictions. Although many explainable machine learning methods have been proposed, post-hoc explanations lack guaranteed fidelity and are sensitive to hyperparameter choices, highlighting the appeal of inherently interpretable models. For example, linear regression provides clear feature effects through its coefficients. However, such models are often outperformed by more complex neural networks (NNs) that usually lack inherent interpretability. To address this dilemma, we introduce NIMO, a framework that combines inherent interpretability with the expressive power of neural networks. Building on the simple linear regression, NIMO is able to provide flexible and intelligible feature effects. Relevantly, we develop an optimization method based on parameter elimination, that allows for optimizing the NN parameters and linear coefficients effectively and efficiently. By relying on adaptive ridge regression we can easily incorporate sparsity as well. We show empirically that our model can provide faithful and intelligible feature effects while maintaining good predictive performance.
title NIMO: a Nonlinear Interpretable MOdel
topic Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.05059