The 60-second answer
Start by identifying the audience and decision: debugging, user recourse, regulatory explanation, or feature-level product insight. Use global tools for overall behavior and local tools for individual predictions; examples include feature importance, SHAP-style attribution, counterfactuals, and interpretable surrogate models.
Build the answer in this order
Start by identifying the audience and decision: debugging, user recourse, regulatory explanation, or feature-level product insight.
Use global tools for overall behavior and local tools for individual predictions; examples include feature importance, SHAP-style attribution, counterfactuals, and interpretable surrogate models.
Validate explanation stability and faithfulness rather than assuming a visualization is correct, and avoid exposing sensitive or gameable features.
Treat explanations as a monitored product surface: version them with the model, log them, and evaluate whether they help the intended user make better decisions.
A useful interview mental model
This is the shape of a strong answer—not a script to memorize.
Senior-level signal
- Senior answers distinguish explanation from causality and discuss when post-hoc explanations can be misleading.
- Include governance: auditability, protected attributes, recourse, and what happens when explanations change after a model update.
What the interviewer is really testing
Likely follow-up questions
Common weak-answer patterns
- Reciting a definition without mechanism or assumptions.
- Claiming one technique is always better without a data regime.
- Stopping before failure modes, validation, or deployment implications.