Tag Archives: explicability

The myth of interpretability and explicability of models

This article was initially written in French and published in November 2021.

Rubinstein (2012) claimed that “in economic theory, like Harry Potter, the Emperor’s New Clothes, or King Solomon’s Tales, we play in imaginary worlds. Economic theory invents tales and calls them models. An economic model is also somewhere between fantasy and reality (…) The word ‘model’ sounds more scientific than the word ‘fable’ or ‘tale’, but I think we are talking about the same thing“. Today, very often, learning models will build a model, based on learning data, and the actuary’s job will be to make sense of it, to find the story – the fable – that it is possible to tell. Continue reading The myth of interpretability and explicability of models