Counterfactual Explanations without Opening the Black Box: Automated Decisions and the GDPR

Understand

There has been much discussion of the right to explanation in the EU General Data Protection Regulation, and its existence, merits, and disadvantages.

• Implementing a right to explanation that opens the black box of algorithmic decision-making faces major legal and technical barriers.
• Explaining the functionality of complex algorithmic decision-making systems and their rationale in specific cases is a technically challenging problem.
• Some explanations may offer little meaningful information to data subjects, raising questions around their value.