LIME — Explaining One Prediction at a Time
Global feature importance tells you what a model relies on overall, but the question people actually ask is local: why did the model deny this particular loan? LIME answers it with a clever trick — approximate the complicated model with a simple, interpretable one in the small neighborhood around a single prediction. It was the method that popularized model-agnostic local explanations, and understanding how it works (and where it's fragile) is essential interpretability literacy.
Why did the model make this one prediction? LIME approximates the complex model with a simple one in the small neighborhood around a single instance — intuitive, model-agnostic, launched the modern wave of local explanation. But it's fragile: unstable across reruns, sensitive to choices, and gameable — which is why SHAP followed.