A Survey of Explainable AI and Proposal for a Discipline of Explanation Engineering

Abstract

In this survey paper, we deep dive into the field of Explainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI). After introducing the scope of this paper, we start by discussing what an "explanation" really is. We then move on to discuss some of the existing approaches to XAI and build a taxonomy of the most popular methods. Next, we also look at a few applications of these and other XAI techniques in four primary domains: finance, autonomous driving, healthcare and manufacturing. We end by introducing a promising discipline, "Explanation Engineering," which includes a systematic approach for designing explainability into AI systems.