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User-friendly, Interactive, and Configurable Explanations for Graph Neural Networks with Graph Views

Published: 09 June 2024 Publication History

Abstract

Explaining the behavior of graph neural networks (GNNs) has become critical due to their "black-box'' nature, especially in the context of analytical tasks such as graph classification. Current approaches are limited to providing explanations for individual instances or specific class labels and may return large explanation structures that are hard to access, nor directly queryable. In this paper, we present GVEX [1] (<u>G</u>raph <u>V</u>iews for GNN <u>EX</u>planation) -- our system developed to offer user-friendly, interactive, and configurable explanations for GNNs based on graph views.
GVEX provides a configuration component to enable users to easily select a desired number of important nodes from different classes, thereby generating explanations tailored to multiple classes of interest. Furthermore, GVEX generates high-quality explanation subgraphs by identifying important nodes exploiting factual and counterfactual properties and by computing their aggregated influence on the remaining nodes following the GNN message passing paradigm. Lastly, GVEX performs a summarize step on top of lower-tier explanation structures to generate higher-tier graph patterns that offer direct access for users with (domain-aware) queries. Our demonstration will highlight (1) a novel two-tier explanation structure called explanation views, consisting of graph patterns and a set of explanation subgraphs, which provide high-quality explanations for GNNs; (2) the system's intuitive GUI facilitates user interaction to configure personalized settings, e.g., classes of interest and explanation size, and compare with other explanation algorithms; (3) GVEX generates queryable explanations, making it easy for human experts to access and inspect with domain knowledge. Our demonstration video is at: https://youtu.be/q9d7ldulIuQ.

References

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Tingyang Chen, Dazhuo Qiu, Yinghui Wu, Arijit Khan, Xiangyu Ke, and Yunjun Gao. 2024. View-based explanations for graph neural networks. In SIGMOD.
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Wenfei Fan, Xin Wang, and Yinghui Wu. 2014. Answering graph pattern queries using views. In ICDE.
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Jeroen Kazius, Ross McGuire, and Roberta Bursi. 2005. Derivation and validation of toxicophores for mutagenicity prediction. Journal of Medicinal Chemistry, Vol. 48, 1 (2005), 312--320.
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Xifeng Yan and Jiawei Han. 2002. gspan: Graph-based substructure pattern mining. In ICDM.
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Zhitao Ying, Dylan Bourgeois, Jiaxuan You, Marinka Zitnik, and Jure Leskovec. 2019. Gnnexplainer: Generating explanations for graph neural networks. In NeurIPS.
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Hao Yuan, Haiyang Yu, Shurui Gui, and Shuiwang Ji. 2023. Explainability in graph neural networks: A taxonomic survey. IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence, Vol. 45, 5 (2023), 5782--5799.
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Hao Yuan, Haiyang Yu, Jie Wang, Kang Li, and Shuiwang Ji. 2021. On explainability of graph neural networks via subgraph explorations. In ICML.
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Shichang Zhang, Yozen Liu, Neil Shah, and Yizhou Sun. 2022. GStarX: Explaining graph neural networks with structure-aware cooperative games. In NeurIPS.
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Wentao Zhang, Zhi Yang, Yexin Wang, Yu Shen, Yang Li, Liang Wang, and Bin Cui. 2021. Grain: Improving data efficiency of graph neural networks via diversified influence maximization. Proc. VLDB Endow., Vol. 14, 11 (2021), 2473--2482.

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  • (2024)Synergies Between Graph Data Management and Machine Learning in Graph Data Pipeline2024 IEEE 40th International Conference on Data Engineering (ICDE)10.1109/ICDE60146.2024.00457(5655-5656)Online publication date: 13-May-2024

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cover image ACM Conferences
SIGMOD/PODS '24: Companion of the 2024 International Conference on Management of Data
June 2024
694 pages
ISBN:9798400704222
DOI:10.1145/3626246
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than the author(s) must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected].

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Published: 09 June 2024

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Author Tags

  1. explainable AI
  2. graph neural networks
  3. graph views

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  • (2024)Synergies Between Graph Data Management and Machine Learning in Graph Data Pipeline2024 IEEE 40th International Conference on Data Engineering (ICDE)10.1109/ICDE60146.2024.00457(5655-5656)Online publication date: 13-May-2024

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