Lime

Lime refers to several small, green citrus fruits, chiefly Citrus aurantiifolia (Key lime) and Citrus × latifolia (Persian lime). The fruit is tart and widely used in drinks, marinades, desserts, and garnishes. Limes originated in Southeast Asia and are now cultivated in tropical and subtropical regions around the world. The juice and zest are used for flavoring, and the fruit can be stored at room temperature for a few days or refrigerated to extend shelf life.

LIME is an acronym for Local Interpretable Model-agnostic Explanations, a machine learning interpretability method introduced in 2016 by Ribeiro, Singh, and Guestrin. It explains the predictions of any classifier by locally approximating the model with an interpretable surrogate model. For a given instance, LIME generates perturbed samples, observes the model’s predictions, and fits a simple model weighted by proximity to the instance. The resulting coefficients indicate which input features contributed to the prediction. As a model-agnostic technique, LIME applies to text, tabular, and image data, but explanations depend on choices such as feature representation, the locality kernel, and the number of samples, and may be unstable under some configurations.