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Interpretable AI

Interpretable AI (IAI) is a suite of machine learning tools that aim for full transparency and understandability by humans. IAI provides a Python interface for their algorithms and can only be used under license. IAI provides a free license for academic use which can be accessed on Alliance systems. For licensing issues, please contact technical support.

Installation on Alliance clusters

  1. Go to the IAI download page and download the latest release of IAI. Be sure to select "Linux" and the correct version of Julia (1.11.3 in these instructions).

  2. Upload the files from Step 1 to the cluster of your choice. Unzip the file, note the location of the files. There should be a sys.so and Artifacts.toml file in the directory. In this example, we'll say /path/to/sysimage/

  3. Load requisite modules: 

    module load StdEnv/2023 python/3.11.5 scipy-stack/2025a julia/1.11.3

  4. Make a Python virtual environment and install IAI: 

    virtualenv --no-download iaiENV && source iaiENV/bin/activate
pip install --no-index --upgrade pip
pip install interpretableai

  5. Install IAI in Julia and build PyCall to work in your virtual environment. Make sure your virtual environment is active before launching Julia: 

    (iaiENV) $ julia

    julia> import Pkg; Pkg.add(url="https://github.com/InterpretableAI/IAISystemImages.jl")
julia> import IAISystemImages
julia> IAISystemImages.install_artifacts("/path/to/sysimage/Artifacts.toml")
julia> using Pkg, PyCall
julia> ENV["PYTHON"] = joinpath(ENV["VIRTUAL_ENV"], "bin", "python")
julia> Pkg.build("PyCall")
julia> exit()

  6. Finish IAI setup in Python: 

    (iaiENV) $ python

    from julia import Julia
Julia(sysimage='/path/to/sysimage/sys.so')
import interpretableai
interpretableai.install()

  7. Import IAI for use in your Python scripts 

    from interpretableai import iai

IMPORTANT NOTE

Important Note

Any Python script using the interpretableai package has to include setting up Julia to run with the IAI system image. This means the following code must be included before importing IAI in your Python scripts. 

from julia import Julia
Julia(sysimage='/path/to/sysimage/sys.so')

It is also a good idea to disable automatic updating in your job script: ```bash export IAI_DISABLE_UPDATE_CHECK=true