An Explainable Artificial Intelligence Framework for the Deterioration Risk Prediction of Hepatitis Patients

In recent years, artificial intelligence-based computer aided diagnosis (CAD) system for the hepatitis has made great progress. Especially, the complex models such as deep learning achieve better performance than the simple ones due to the nonlinear hypotheses of the real world clinical data. However,complex model as a black box, which ignores why it make a certain decision, causes the model distrust from clinicians. To solve these issues, an explainable artificial intelligence (XAI) framework is proposed in this paper to give the global and local interpretation of auxiliary diagnosis of hepatitis while retaining the good prediction performance. First, a public hepatitis classification benchmark from UCI is used to test the feasibility of the framework. Then, the transparent and black-box machine learning models are both employed to forecast the hepatitis deterioration. The transparent models such as logistic regression (LR), decision tree (DT)and k-nearest neighbor (KNN) are picked. While the black-box model such as the eXtreme Gradient Boosting (XGBoost), support vector machine (SVM), random forests (RF) are selected. Finally, the SHapley Additive exPlanations (SHAP), Local Interpretable Model-agnostic Explanations (LIME) and Partial Dependence Plots (PDP) are utilized to improve the model interpretation of liver disease. The experimental results show that the complex models outperform the simple ones. The developed RF achieves the highest accuracy (91.9%) among all the models. The proposed framework combining the global and local interpretable methods improves the transparency of complex models, and gets insight into the judgments from the complex models, thereby guiding the treatment strategy and improving the prognosis of hepatitis patients. In addition, the proposed framework could also assist the clinical data scientists to design a more appropriate structure of CAD.