A model local interpretation routine for deep learning based radio galaxy classification

Radio galaxy morphological classification is one of the critical steps when producing source catalogues for large-scale radio continuum surveys. While many recent studies attempted to classify source radio morphology from survey image data using deep learning algorithms (i.e., Convolutional Neural Networks), they concentrated on model robustness most time. It is unclear whether a model similarly makes predictions as radio astronomers did. In this work, we used Local Interpretable Model-agnostic Explanation (LIME), an state-of-the-art eXplainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI) technique to explain model prediction behaviour and thus examine the hypothesis in a proof-of-concept manner. In what follows, we describe how LIME generally works and early results about how it helped explain predictions of a radio galaxy classification model using this technique.¹¹Hongming Tang and Shiyu Yue have equally contributed to this work.