Designing an Interpretable Interface for Contextual Bandits

Abstract

Contextual bandits have become an increasingly popular solution for personalized recommender systems. Despite their growing use, the interpretability of these systems remains a significant challenge, particularly for the often non-expert operators tasked with ensuring their optimal performance. In this paper, we address this challenge by designing a new interface to explain to domain experts the underlying behaviour of a bandit. Central is a metric we term "value gain", a measure derived from off-policy evaluation to quantify the real-world impact of sub-components within a bandit. We conduct a qualitative user study to evaluate the effectiveness of our interface. Our findings suggest that by carefully balancing technical rigour with accessible presentation, it is possible to empower non-experts to manage complex machine learning systems. We conclude by outlining guiding principles that other researchers should consider when building similar such interfaces in future.