{"about":{"site":"https://codewithpapers.app","non_affiliation":"Code with Papers and Syntology are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Papers with Code, Meta, or the pwc-archive mirror.","licence":"CC BY-SA 4.0","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","attribution":"https://codewithpapers.app/attribution","modified":"archive material modified by Syntology; see the attribution page"},"url":"/paper/finding-the-right-xai-method-a-guide-for-the","title":"Finding the right XAI method -- A Guide for the Evaluation and Ranking of Explainable AI Methods in Climate Science","arxiv_id":"2303.00652","date":"2023-03-01","proceeding":null,"authors":["Philine Bommer","Marlene Kretschmer","Anna Hedström","Dilyara Bareeva","Marina M. -C. Höhne"],"abstract":"Explainable artificial intelligence (XAI) methods shed light on the predictions of machine learning algorithms. Several different approaches exist and have already been applied in climate science. However, usually missing ground truth explanations complicate their evaluation and comparison, subsequently impeding the choice of the XAI method. Therefore, in this work, we introduce XAI evaluation in the climate context and discuss different desired explanation properties, namely robustness, faithfulness, randomization, complexity, and localization. To this end, we chose previous work as a case study where the decade of annual-mean temperature maps is predicted. After training both a multi-layer perceptron (MLP) and a convolutional neural network (CNN), multiple XAI methods are applied and their skill scores in reference to a random uniform explanation are calculated for each property. Independent of the network, we find that XAI methods Integrated Gradients, layer-wise relevance propagation, and input times gradients exhibit considerable robustness, faithfulness, and complexity while sacrificing randomization performance. Sensitivity methods -- gradient, SmoothGrad, NoiseGrad, and FusionGrad, match the robustness skill but sacrifice faithfulness and complexity for randomization skill. We find architecture-dependent performance differences regarding robustness, complexity and localization skills of different XAI methods, highlighting the necessity for research task-specific evaluation. Overall, our work offers an overview of different evaluation properties in the climate science context and shows how to compare and benchmark different explanation methods, assessing their suitability based on strengths and weaknesses, for the specific research problem at hand. By that, we aim to support climate researchers in the selection of a suitable XAI method.","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2303.00652v2","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2303.00652v2.pdf","source":{"archive":"pwc-archive (Hugging Face), CC BY-SA 4.0","snapshot":"2025-07-28","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","row_kind":"abstracts"},"code_links":[{"paper_slug":"finding-the-right-xai-method-a-guide-for-the","repo_url":"https://github.com/philine-bommer/climate_x_quantus","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":1,"mentioned_in_github":1,"framework":"tf","reach":{"status":"ok","spdx":"MIT"}}],"tasks":[{"task_slug":"xai","task_name":"Explainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI)"},{"task_slug":"explainable-artificial-intelligence","task_name":"Explainable artificial intelligence"}],"methods":[],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"atlas_url":"https://app.syntology.ai/?focus=2303.00652","mcp":{"get_harvested_code_for_paper":{"arxiv_id":"2303.00652"}},"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers","read_at":"2026-09-24T18:15:14+00:00","read_at_is":"when the build read Syntology's graph, not when any sample ran","claim":"Per-sample execution status on synthesized fixtures; not a correctness claim about the paper. 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