Tl;DR: You can predict something, but how do you explain the prediction?
Your usual classification/regression setup
Lets say the data is a classic regression/classification problem: several numerical columns, several nominal columns, and an event which we are trying to predict:
user1, age:18, wealth:20000, likes:tomatoes, isInBigCity:yes, hasClicked:yes user2, age:25, wealth:24000, likes:carrots , isInBigCity:no , hasClicked:no ...
With the help of Random Forests, SVM, Logistic Regression, Deep Neural Network, or some other method we export a model that can output a probability of the event hasClicked:yes
for a new user faced with the choice of clicking.
Extracting the inner topology surfaced by a model
Now, those algorithm do some dimensionality reduction, reducing those inputs to a single probability. My question is: how would you extract what those models are doing and show the dimensionality reduction steps to a human? How would you illustrate the inner topology of the dataset with regards to the predicted class?
I am looking for either:
Visualizations of what a model produced by Random Forests, SVM, Logistic Regression, Deep Neural Network is doing.
Clusterers being extracted from regression/classification models (Surely a single decision tree can be viewed as a hierarchical clusterer)
A model-specific way to project the input data in a space where the Euclidian distance of T-SNE makes sense.
A way to learn a T-SNE-compatible distance out of a regression/classification model.
Clustering methods that optimise the separation of one variable while not using it to cluster.
Clusterers built out of regression/classification models
The goal is to extract some sort market segmentation based on the behaviour of users. And give a high level visualization of it. Something that would expose clearly the reasons why some users transform better than others.