Explainable Decisions

Posted on February 12, 2018 by decisionmanagementcommunity

Majority of decision modeling experts agree that decision models producing business decisions should be able to explain why these decisions were made. Silvie Spreeuwenberg even wrote that “Advice Without Explanation Is Not Very Intelligent“. Tomorrow FICO will run a special webinar “Unlocking the Full Potential of your Business Outcomes with Explainable Decisions“. They correctly say: “Only with explainable decisions will you be able to identify alternative approaches, project an accurate range of consequences, and deliver potentially game-changing results.” We would like to create a list of articles that deal with decision explanations. We ask our readers to post here their comments with the proper references. Vendors are welcome to describe how their BR&DM products produce explanations.

This entry was posted in Decision Modeling, Explanations. Bookmark the permalink.

2 Responses to Explainable Decisions

  1. jacobfeldman says:
    February 16, 2018 at 8:05 pm

    In 2013 Ron Ross wrote: “Imagine you had a Why Button handy whenever you encountered some disconnect in day-to-day business operations. Hit the Why Button and presto – answers appear in the form of relevant business rules”.

    In Dec-2016 OpenRules introduced a graphical “Why-Analyzer for Decision Modeling” (http://openrules.com/WhyAnalyzer.htm) that provides such a Why Button for DMN-based decision models. Actually it is much more than just a button but rather a graphical interface that allows business analysts to analyze the results produced by their decision models using their own test cases created directly in Excel. The latest OpenRules release also produces explanation reports in the HTML format which along with all actually executed rules show all involved decision variables and their values at the moment when the rule was executed – see http://openrules.com/ReleaseNotes_6.4.3.htm#NewExecutionReports.

    Reply
  2. mikeparishcorticon says:
    February 18, 2018 at 5:25 pm

    Every decision made by the system should be able to provide a detailed explanation of exactly how that decision was made. It should show the steps in making the decision, any critical values used in the decision and should be able to trace back to the original policy documents from which the rules were derived. And it should also be possible to save that data in a permanent audit trail. It should even be possible to “replay” an old execution (using the appropriate version of the decision service) at any future time.
    To see how Corticon implements explanations follow this link https://dmcommunity.files.wordpress.com/2018/02/corticondecisionexplanations.pdf

    Reply

Leave a comment