Netcompany Intrasoft, coordinator of EVENFLOW project, participated in the 10th IEEE International Conference on Data Science and Advanced Analytics (DSAA’23) which was held from 9 to 13 October 2023, in Thessaloniki, Greece. More specifically, Thanasis Papadakis from EVENFLOW coordinator presented the paper titled Feature Selection via Minimal Covering Sets for Industrial Internet of Things Applications.

Abstract: High stakes decision making requires that any decision support systems must be able to come up with plausible explanations about the decisions they propose to the user. Several popular approaches to explaining black-box AI systems, such as neural networks, focus either on highlighting the features that matter the most in one particular decision as in the SHAP models, or on developing a local to the particular instance data model that is explainable by nature, such as a decision tree. ML systems that are by default explainable and/or interpretable, such as decision trees, or rule-based systems do not require such third-party approaches, as they are themselves explainable. Nevertheless, presenting a consistent (small) set of features to the users as explanations for any given proposed decision can increase the confidence of the users towards the reliability of the system. For this reason, we have developed a system that given a set of rules that hold on a training dataset, finds a minimal cardinality set of features that are used in a set of rules that together cover the entire training dataset. We develop a parallel heuristic algorithm for finding such a minimal variables set, and we show it outperforms all state-of-the-art optimization solvers for finding the solution to a MIP formulation of the problem. Experiments with data from use cases applying AI in public policy decision making as well as in medical use cases show that the proposed small set of features is sufficient to explain all the cases in the test dataset via rules containing only variables from the proposed set of features.

The 10th IEEE International Conference on Data Science and Advanced Analytics (DSAA) features its strong interdisciplinary synergy between statistics, computing and information/intelligence sciences, and cross-domain interactions between academia and business for data science and analytics. DSAA sets up a high standard for its organising committee, keynote speeches, submissions to main conference and special sessions, and a competitive rate for paper acceptance. DSAA has been widely recognised as a dedicated flagship annual meeting in data science and analytics such as by the Google Metrics and China Computer Foundation. DSAA’2023 provides a premier forum that brings together researchers, industry and government practitioners, as well as developers and users of big data solutions for the exchange of the latest theoretical developments in Data Science and the best practice for a wide range of applications. DSAA’2023 invites submissions of papers describing innovative research on all aspects of data science and advanced analytics as well as application-oriented papers that make significant, original, and reproducible contributions to improving the practice of data science and analytics in real-world scenarios.