Coverage for Identifying Critical Metadata in Machine Learning Operating Envelopes

Specifying the conditions under which a machine learning (ML) model was trained is crucial to defining the operating envelope which in turn is important for understanding where the model has known and unknown performance. Metrics such as combinatorial coverage applied over metadata features provide a mechanism for defining the envelope for computer vision algorithms, but not all metadata features impact performance. In this work, we propose Systematic Inclusion & Exclusion, an experimental framework that draws on practices from combinatorial interaction testing and design of experiments to identify the critical metadata features that define the dimensions of the operating envelope. A data splitting algorithm to construct training and test sets for a collection of models is developed to implement the framework. The framework is demonstrated on an open-source dataset and learning algorithm, and future directions and improvements are suggested.