A Unified Framework for Uncertainty-Aware Explainable Artificial Intelligence: A Case Study in Power Quality Disturbance Classification

Post-hoc explainable AI (XAI) methods usually return one attribution map, even when the model represents uncertainty in its parameters. We define the explanation distribution as the distribution of attribution maps obtained from sampled models. The uncertainty-aware relevance attribution operator (UA-RAO) summarises this distribution using the mean, dispersion, quantiles, and agreement sets. The theory separates posterior-approximation error from finite-sample error and accounts for changes across activation boundaries and for stochastic explainers. On a 15-class power-quality-disturbance benchmark, the mean occlusion explanation from a deep ensemble aligns better with known disturbance regions than the deterministic baseline, although the improvement depends on the disturbance type. Tests with controlled input distortions show that additive noise changes the explanations more than amplitude scaling or aligned temporal shifts.