Graph Neural Network Causal Explanation via Neural Causal Models

Fuente: arXiv
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Autores principales: Behnam, Arman, Wang, Binghui
Formato: Preprint
Publicado: 2024
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author Behnam, Arman
Wang, Binghui
author_facet Behnam, Arman
Wang, Binghui
contents Graph neural network (GNN) explainers identify the important subgraph that ensures the prediction for a given graph. Until now, almost all GNN explainers are based on association, which is prone to spurious correlations. We propose {\name}, a GNN causal explainer via causal inference. Our explainer is based on the observation that a graph often consists of a causal underlying subgraph. {\name} includes three main steps: 1) It builds causal structure and the corresponding structural causal model (SCM) for a graph, which enables the cause-effect calculation among nodes. 2) Directly calculating the cause-effect in real-world graphs is computationally challenging. It is then enlightened by the recent neural causal model (NCM), a special type of SCM that is trainable, and design customized NCMs for GNNs. By training these GNN NCMs, the cause-effect can be easily calculated. 3) It uncovers the subgraph that causally explains the GNN predictions via the optimized GNN-NCMs. Evaluation results on multiple synthetic and real-world graphs validate that {\name} significantly outperforms existing GNN explainers in exact groundtruth explanation identification
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2407_09378
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Graph Neural Network Causal Explanation via Neural Causal Models
Behnam, Arman
Wang, Binghui
Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
Graph neural network (GNN) explainers identify the important subgraph that ensures the prediction for a given graph. Until now, almost all GNN explainers are based on association, which is prone to spurious correlations. We propose {\name}, a GNN causal explainer via causal inference. Our explainer is based on the observation that a graph often consists of a causal underlying subgraph. {\name} includes three main steps: 1) It builds causal structure and the corresponding structural causal model (SCM) for a graph, which enables the cause-effect calculation among nodes. 2) Directly calculating the cause-effect in real-world graphs is computationally challenging. It is then enlightened by the recent neural causal model (NCM), a special type of SCM that is trainable, and design customized NCMs for GNNs. By training these GNN NCMs, the cause-effect can be easily calculated. 3) It uncovers the subgraph that causally explains the GNN predictions via the optimized GNN-NCMs. Evaluation results on multiple synthetic and real-world graphs validate that {\name} significantly outperforms existing GNN explainers in exact groundtruth explanation identification
title Graph Neural Network Causal Explanation via Neural Causal Models
topic Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2407.09378