Machine learning (ML) has witnessed tremendous successes in the last decade in classification, regression, and prediction areas. However, many ML models are used, and sometimes even designed, as black boxes. When such models do not operate properly, their creators do not often know what is the best way to improve them. Moreover, even when operating successfully, users often require to understand how and why they take certain decisions to gain trust therein. We present how visualization and visual analytics helps towards explaining (and improving) ML models. These cover tasks such as understanding high-dimensional datasets; understanding unit specialization during the training of deep learning models; exploring how training samples determine the shape of classification decision boundaries; and helping users annotating samples in semi-supervised active learning scenarios.

About the speaker

Alex Telea works as a full professor in Visual Data Analytics at the Department of Information and Computing Science at Utrecht University, where he leads the Visual Data Analytics Group. His research focuses on the creation of interactive techniques to visually depict, explore, and explain large amounts of complex, time-dependent, and heterogeneous data. Specific topics of interest are: visualization of relational data, visualization for explaining artificial intelligence methods, visualization of large software systems, and visual exploration of high-dimensional data collections. He applies the results of his research to various application domains, including geoinformation systems, medical imaging, software maintenance, and 3D shape processing, together with stakeholders from both academia and the IT industry.

As a teacher he is involved in courses in scientific and information visualization, visual analytics, software visualization, and multimedia retrieval. He is the author of “Data Visualization – Principles and Practice” (CRC Press, 2nd edition, 2014), one of the most used textbooks in teaching visualization to students and practitioners worldwide.