  With the availability of large databases and recent improvements in deep
learning methodology, the performance of AI systems is reaching or even
exceeding the human level on an increasing number of complex tasks. Impressive
examples of this development can be found in domains such as image
classification, sentiment analysis, speech understanding or strategic game
playing. However, because of their nested non-linear structure, these highly
successful machine learning and artificial intelligence models are usually
applied in a black box manner, i.e., no information is provided about what
exactly makes them arrive at their predictions. Since this lack of transparency
can be a major drawback, e.g., in medical applications, the development of
methods for visualizing, explaining and interpreting deep learning models has
recently attracted increasing attention. This paper summarizes recent
developments in this field and makes a plea for more interpretability in
artificial intelligence. Furthermore, it presents two approaches to explaining
predictions of deep learning models, one method which computes the sensitivity
of the prediction with respect to changes in the input and one approach which
meaningfully decomposes the decision in terms of the input variables. These
methods are evaluated on three classification tasks.
