ScatterUQ: Interactive Uncertainty Visualizations for Multiclass Deep Learning Problems

TL;DR

ScatterUQ is an interactive visualization system that helps users understand uncertainty in multiclass deep learning models by providing targeted 2-D scatter plots that explain why a model predicts certain classes or identifies out-of-distribution samples.

Contribution

The paper introduces ScatterUQ, a novel interactive system combining recent neural network advances and dimensionality reduction to visually interpret model uncertainty in multiclass classification.

Findings

Effective visualization of model uncertainty for in-distribution and out-of-distribution data.

Quantitative evaluation of dimensionality reduction techniques for better explanations.

System scales to arbitrary multiclass datasets and improves interpretability.

Abstract

Recently, uncertainty-aware deep learning methods for multiclass labeling problems have been developed that provide calibrated class prediction probabilities and out-of-distribution (OOD) indicators, letting machine learning (ML) consumers and engineers gauge a model's confidence in its predictions. However, this extra neural network prediction information is challenging to scalably convey visually for arbitrary data sources under multiple uncertainty contexts. To address these challenges, we present ScatterUQ, an interactive system that provides targeted visualizations to allow users to better understand model performance in context-driven uncertainty settings. ScatterUQ leverages recent advances in distance-aware neural networks, together with dimensionality reduction techniques, to construct robust, 2-D scatter plots explaining why a model predicts a test example to be (1) in-distribution and of a particular class, (2) in-distribution but unsure of the class, and (3) out-of-distribution. ML consumers and engineers can visually compare the salient features of test samples with training examples through the use of a ``hover callback'' to understand model uncertainty performance and decide follow up courses of action. We demonstrate the effectiveness of ScatterUQ to explain model uncertainty for a multiclass image classification on a distance-aware neural network trained on Fashion-MNIST and tested on Fashion-MNIST (in distribution) and MNIST digits (out of distribution), as well as a deep learning model for a cyber dataset. We quantitatively evaluate dimensionality reduction techniques to optimize our contextually driven UQ visualizations. Our results indicate that the ScatterUQ system should scale to arbitrary, multiclass datasets. Our code is available at https://github.com/mit-ll-responsible-ai/equine-webapp