A Classification of Anomaly Explanation Methods

International audienceThe usage of algorithms in real-world situations is strongly desired. But, in order to achieve that, final users need to be reassured that they can trust the outputs of algorithms. Building this trust requires algorithms not only to produce accurate results, but also to explain why they got those results. From this last problematic a new field has emerged: eXplainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI). Deep learning has greatly benefited from that field, especially for classification tasks. The considerable amount of works and surveys devoted to deep explanation methods can attest that. Other machine learning tasks, like anomaly detection, have received less attention when it comes to explaining the algorithms outputs. In this paper, we focus on anomaly explanation. Our contribution is a categorization of anomaly explanation methods and an analysis of the different forms anomaly explanations may take