Trust in machine-learning models is critical for deployment by users, especially for high-risk tasks such as healthcare. Model trust involves much more than performance metrics such as accuracy, precision, or recall. It includes user readiness to allow a model to make decisions. Model trust is a multifaceted concept commonly associated with the stability of model predictions under variations in training data, noise, algorithmic parameters, and model explanations. This paper extends existing model trust concepts by introducing a novel Model Sureness measure. Some alternatively purposed Model Sureness measures have been proposed. Here, Model Sureness quantitatively measures the model accuracy stability under training data variations. For any model, this is carried out by combining the proposed Bidirectional Active Processing and Visual Knowledge Discovery. The proposed Bidirectional Active Processing method iteratively retrains a model on varied training data until a user-defined stopping criterion is met; in this work, this criterion is set to a 95% accuracy when the model is evaluated on the test data. This process further finds a minimal sufficient training dataset required for a model to satisfy this criterion. Accordingly, the proposed Model Sureness measure is defined as the ratio of the number of unnecessary cases to all cases in the training data along with variations of these ratios. Higher ratios indicate a greater Model Sureness under this measure, while trust in a model is ultimately a human decision based on multiple measures. Case studies conducted on three benchmark datasets from biology, medicine, and handwritten digit recognition demonstrate a well-preserved model accuracy with Model Sureness scores that reflect the capabilities of the evaluated models. Specifically, unnecessary case removal ranged from 20% to 80%, with an average reduction of approximately 50% of the training data.
Williams et al. (Thu,) studied this question.