Intelligible Models for HealthCare

In machine learning often a tradeoff must be made between accuracy and intelligibility. More accurate models such as boosted trees, random forests, and neural nets usually are not intelligible, but more intelligible models such as logistic regression, naive-Bayes, and single decision trees often have significantly worse accuracy. This tradeoff sometimes limits the accuracy of models that can be applied in mission-critical applications such as healthcare where being able to understand, validate, edit, and trust a learned model is important. We present two case studies where high-performance generalized additive models with pairwise interactions (GA2Ms) are applied to real healthcare problems yielding…