To explain or describe?

Can you comment on the terms in use and their reach? Colloquially, to explain means to unpack the details or to at least highlight some defining aspects. Here, we’re talking about the latter: The explanation is a simpler representation, a slice of the more complex whole. In a more scientific context, to explain is to understand the how and why behind some phenomena (more aligned to unpacking the details).

My concern is that these aspects are being blurred. The ambiguity of the term makes it easy to start from the technically correct definition of the thing as a simplifying description, to the more expansive but technically inaccurate sense of the term. Since the details are rarely shared, this in turn leads people to understate the challenge of interpretability or assume that it reaches into the more ambitious strata of how and why. Is this a legitimate concern?

Thanks for this summary. I found your language careful and precise. It was only this statement in the conclusion that prompted my knee jerk reaction: “LIME is a great tool to explain what machine learning classifiers (or models) are doing.” Yes, provided it’s understood that LIME is merely doing the slicing and people are left to do the explaining.