In recent times, the progress of machine learning has facilitated the development of decision support systems that exhibit predictive accuracy, surpassing human capabilities in certain scenarios. However, this improvement has come at the cost of increased model complexity, rendering them black-box models that obscure their internal logic from users. These black boxes are primarily designed to optimize predictive accuracy, limiting their applicability in critical domains such as medicine, law, and finance, where both accuracy and interpretability are crucial factors for model acceptance. Despite the growing body of research on interpretability, there remains a significant dearth of evaluation methods for the proposed approaches. This survey aims to shed light on various evaluation methods employed in interpreting models. Two primary procedures are prevalent in the literature: qualitative and quantitative evaluations. Qualitative evaluations rely on human assessments, while quantitative evaluations utilize computational metrics. Human evaluation commonly manifests as either researcher intuition or well-designed experiments. However, this approach is susceptible to human biases and fatigue and cannot adequately compare two models. Consequently, there has been a recent decline in the use of human evaluation, with computational metrics gaining prominence as a more rigorous method for comparing and assessing different approaches. These metrics are designed to serve specific goals, such as fidelity, comprehensibility, or stability. The existing metrics often face challenges when scaling or being applied to different types of model outputs and alternative approaches. Another important factor that needs to be addressed is that while evaluating interpretability methods, their results may not always be entirely accurate. For instance, relying on the drop in probability to assess fidelity can be problematic, particularly when facing the challenge of out-of-distribution data. Furthermore, a fundamental challenge in the interpretability domain is the lack of consensus regarding its definition and requirements. This issue is compounded in the evaluation process and becomes particularly apparent when assessing comprehensibility.

Understanding the reasoning behind a predictive model’s decision is an important and longstanding problem driven by ethical and legal considerations. Most recent research has focused on the interpretability of supervised models, whereas unsupervised learning has received less attention. However, the majority of the focus was on interpreting the whole model in a manner that undermined accuracy or model assumptions, while local interpretation received much less attention. Therefore, we propose an intrinsic interpretation for the Gaussian mixture model that provides both global insight and local interpretations. We employed the Bhattacharyya coefficient to measure the overlap and divergence across clusters to provide a global interpretation in terms of the differences and similarities between the clusters. By analyzing the GMM exponent with the Garthwaite–Kock corr-max transformation, the local interpretation is provided in terms of the relative contribution of each feature to the overall distance. Experimental results obtained on three datasets show that the proposed interpretation method outperforms the post hoc model-agnostic LIME in determining the feature contribution to the cluster assignment.

Acknowledging the importance of the ability to communicate with other people, the researcher community has developed a series of BCI-spellers, with the goal of regaining communication and interaction capabilities with the environment for people with disabilities. In order to bridge the gap in the digital divide between the disabled and the non-disabled people, we believe that the development of efficient signal processing algorithms and strategies will go a long way towards achieving novel assistive technologies using new human–computer interfaces. In this paper, we present various classification strategies that would be adopted by P300 spellers adopting the row/column paradigm. The presented strategies have obtained high accuracy rates compared with existent similar research works.

Background: Early childhood caries (ECC) affects a substantial proportion of young children worldwide, and timely screening is essential for early intervention and referral. While deep learning has shown promise for automated dental diagnostics, many existing approaches rely on computationally heavy models that limit deployment in community and mobile settings. This study investigates whether compact convolutional neural networks can achieve clinically meaningful performance for screening dental caries from oral photographs. Methods: We curated a dataset of 435 intraoral images from children aged 3–14 years, annotated by licensed dentists, and performed patient-level stratified splitting to prevent data leakage. Three convolutional neural networks (ResNet-18, MobileNetV3-Small, and EfficientNet-B0) were fine-tuned using ImageNet-pretrained weights and comparatively evaluated for the detection of dental caries from oral photographs. Models were trained with class-weighted cross-entropy loss and evaluated on a held-out test set using sensitivity, specificity, balanced accuracy, ROC-AUC, and PR-AUC with bootstrap 95% confidence intervals. Results: ResNet-18 achieved the highest balanced accuracy (0.929), weighted F1-score (0.954), and perfect sensitivity (1.00), while EfficientNet-B0 achieved the strongest threshold-independent discrimination with the highest ROC-AUC (0.978) and PR-AUC (0.990). MobileNetV3-Small maintained competitive performance (ROC-AUC 0.952; PR-AUC 0.976) with substantially lower computational complexity. Conclusions: In addition to performance evaluation, we incorporated an interpretability analysis using Grad-CAM to examine model decision behavior. The resulting attribution maps predominantly highlighted clinically relevant tooth regions associated with caries, providing evidence that the models rely on meaningful dental features rather than background artifacts. These results demonstrate that compact, deployment-friendly architectures can achieve clinically meaningful performance for ECC detection, supporting their suitability for scalable, real-world screening applications.

Nouf AlShenaifi, Nourah Alangari, Hadeel Al-Negheimish. Proceedings of The Second Arabic Natural Language Processing Conference. 2024.

Nourah Alangari, Nouf AlShenaifi. Proceedings of The Third Arabic Natural Language Processing Conference: Shared Tasks. 2025.