MotifExplainer: a Motif-based Graph Neural Network Explainer

Zhaoning Yu, Hongyang Gao

Keywords: Graph Neural Networks, Explainer, Motif

TL;DR: We propose a motif-based explainer that can provide better human-understandable explanations than methods based on nodes, edges, and regular subgraphs.

Abstract: We consider the explanation problem of Graph Neural Networks (GNNs). Most existing GNN explanation methods identify the most important edges or nodes but fail to consider substructures, which are more important for graph data. One method considering subgraphs tries to search all possible subgraphs and identifies the most significant ones. However, the subgraphs identified may not be recurrent or statistically important for interpretation. This work proposes a novel method, named MotifExplainer, to explain GNNs by identifying important motifs, which are recurrent and statistically significant patterns in graphs. Our proposed motif-based methods can provide better human-understandable explanations than methods based on nodes, edges, and regular subgraphs. Given an instance graph and a pre-trained GNN model, our method first extracts motifs in the graph using domain-specific motif extraction rules. Then, a motif embedding is encoded by feeding motifs into the pre-trained GNN. Finally, we employ an attention-based method to identify the most influential motifs as explanations for the prediction results. The empirical studies on both synthetic and real-world datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our method.

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