Improving the interpretability of GNN predictions through conformal-based graph sparsification

Fuente: arXiv
Enregistré dans:
Détails bibliographiques
Auteurs principaux: Sanchez-Martin, Pablo, Khan, Kinaan Aamir, Valera, Isabel
Format: Preprint
Publié: 2024
Sujets:
Accès en ligne:
Tags: Ajouter un tag
Pas de tags, Soyez le premier à ajouter un tag!
_version_ 1866911845224284160
author Sanchez-Martin, Pablo
Khan, Kinaan Aamir
Valera, Isabel
author_facet Sanchez-Martin, Pablo
Khan, Kinaan Aamir
Valera, Isabel
contents Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have achieved state-of-the-art performance in solving graph classification tasks. However, most GNN architectures aggregate information from all nodes and edges in a graph, regardless of their relevance to the task at hand, thus hindering the interpretability of their predictions. In contrast to prior work, in this paper we propose a GNN \emph{training} approach that jointly i) finds the most predictive subgraph by removing edges and/or nodes -- -\emph{without making assumptions about the subgraph structure} -- while ii) optimizing the performance of the graph classification task. To that end, we rely on reinforcement learning to solve the resulting bi-level optimization with a reward function based on conformal predictions to account for the current in-training uncertainty of the classifier. Our empirical results on nine different graph classification datasets show that our method competes in performance with baselines while relying on significantly sparser subgraphs, leading to more interpretable GNN-based predictions.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2404_12356
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Improving the interpretability of GNN predictions through conformal-based graph sparsification
Sanchez-Martin, Pablo
Khan, Kinaan Aamir
Valera, Isabel
Machine Learning
Social and Information Networks
Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have achieved state-of-the-art performance in solving graph classification tasks. However, most GNN architectures aggregate information from all nodes and edges in a graph, regardless of their relevance to the task at hand, thus hindering the interpretability of their predictions. In contrast to prior work, in this paper we propose a GNN \emph{training} approach that jointly i) finds the most predictive subgraph by removing edges and/or nodes -- -\emph{without making assumptions about the subgraph structure} -- while ii) optimizing the performance of the graph classification task. To that end, we rely on reinforcement learning to solve the resulting bi-level optimization with a reward function based on conformal predictions to account for the current in-training uncertainty of the classifier. Our empirical results on nine different graph classification datasets show that our method competes in performance with baselines while relying on significantly sparser subgraphs, leading to more interpretable GNN-based predictions.
title Improving the interpretability of GNN predictions through conformal-based graph sparsification
topic Machine Learning
Social and Information Networks
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2404.12356