{"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/webshap-towards-explaining-any-machine","title":"WebSHAP: Towards Explaining Any Machine Learning Models Anywhere","arxiv_id":"2303.09545","date":"2023-03-16","proceeding":null,"authors":["Zijie J. Wang","Duen Horng Chau"],"abstract":"As machine learning (ML) is increasingly integrated into our everyday Web experience, there is a call for transparent and explainable web-based ML. However, existing explainability techniques often require dedicated backend servers, which limit their usefulness as the Web community moves toward in-browser ML for lower latency and greater privacy. To address the pressing need for a client-side explainability solution, we present WebSHAP, the first in-browser tool that adapts the state-of-the-art model-agnostic explainability technique SHAP to the Web environment. Our open-source tool is developed with modern Web technologies such as WebGL that leverage client-side hardware capabilities and make it easy to integrate into existing Web ML applications. We demonstrate WebSHAP in a usage scenario of explaining ML-based loan approval decisions to loan applicants. Reflecting on our work, we discuss the opportunities and challenges for future research on transparent Web ML. WebSHAP is available at https://github.com/poloclub/webshap.","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2303.09545v1","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2303.09545v1.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":"webshap-towards-explaining-any-machine","repo_url":"https://github.com/poloclub/webshap","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":1,"mentioned_in_github":1,"framework":"tf","reach":{"status":"ok","spdx":"MIT"}},{"paper_slug":"webshap-towards-explaining-any-machine","repo_url":"https://github.com/poloclub/mememo","is_official":0,"mentioned_in_paper":0,"mentioned_in_github":1,"framework":"none","reach":null}],"tasks":[],"methods":[{"method_slug":"shap","method_name":"SHAP"}],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"atlas_url":null,"mcp":null,"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers"},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}