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Publications
  • 2022
  • Article
  • Proceedings of the International Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Statistics (AISTATS)

Probing GNN Explainers: A Rigorous Theoretical and Empirical Analysis of GNN Explanation Methods.

By: Chirag Agarwal, Marinka Zitnik and Himabindu Lakkaraju
  • Format:Electronic
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Abstract

As Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) are increasingly employed in real-world applications, it becomes critical to ensure that the stakeholders understand the rationale behind their predictions. While several GNN explanation methods have been proposed recently, there has been little to no work on theoretically analyzing the behavior of these methods or systematically evaluating their effectiveness. Here, we introduce the first axiomatic framework for theoretically analyzing, evaluating, and comparing state-of-the-art GNN explanation methods. We outline and formalize the key desirable properties that all GNN explanation methods should satisfy in order to generate reliable explanations, namely, faithfulness, stability, and fairness. We leverage these properties to present the first ever theoretical analysis of the effectiveness of state-of-the-art GNN explanation methods. Our analysis establishes upper bounds on all the aforementioned properties for popular GNN explanation methods. We also leverage our framework to empirically evaluate these methods on multiple real-world datasets from diverse domains. Our empirical results demonstrate that some popular GNN explanation methods (e.g., gradient-based methods) perform no better than a random baseline and that methods which leverage the graph structure are more effective than those that solely rely on the node features.

Keywords

Graph Neural Networks; Explanation Methods; Mathematical Methods; Framework; Theory; Analysis

Citation

Agarwal, Chirag, Marinka Zitnik, and Himabindu Lakkaraju. "Probing GNN Explainers: A Rigorous Theoretical and Empirical Analysis of GNN Explanation Methods." Proceedings of the International Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Statistics (AISTATS) 25th (2022).
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About The Author

Himabindu Lakkaraju

Technology and Operations Management
→More Publications

More from the Authors

    • 2023
    • Faculty Research

    When Algorithms Explain Themselves: AI Adoption and Accuracy of Experts' Decisions

    By: Himabindu Lakkaraju and Chiara Farronato
    • 2022
    • Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS)

    Which Explanation Should I Choose? A Function Approximation Perspective to Characterizing Post hoc Explanations

    By: Tessa Han, Suraj Srinivas and Himabindu Lakkaraju
    • 2022
    • Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS)

    Efficiently Training Low-Curvature Neural Networks

    By: Suraj Srinivas, Kyle Matoba, Himabindu Lakkaraju and Francois Fleuret
More from the Authors
  • When Algorithms Explain Themselves: AI Adoption and Accuracy of Experts' Decisions By: Himabindu Lakkaraju and Chiara Farronato
  • Which Explanation Should I Choose? A Function Approximation Perspective to Characterizing Post hoc Explanations By: Tessa Han, Suraj Srinivas and Himabindu Lakkaraju
  • Efficiently Training Low-Curvature Neural Networks By: Suraj Srinivas, Kyle Matoba, Himabindu Lakkaraju and Francois Fleuret
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