GraphFramEx: Towards Systematic Evaluation of Explainability Methods for Graph Neural Networks

Kenza Amara, Zhitao Ying, Zitao Zhang, Zhihao Han, Yinan Shan, Ulrik Brandes, Sebastian Schemm

Keywords: Graph neural networks, explainability, systematic evaluation

TL;DR: We propose the first systematic evaluation framework for graph neural network explainability.

Abstract:

As one of the most popular machine learning models today, graph neural networks (GNNs) have attracted intense interest recently, and so does their explainability. Unfortunately, today's evaluation frameworks for GNN explainability often rely on few inadequate synthetic datasets, leading to conclusions of limited scope due to a lack of complexity in the problem instances. As GNN models are deployed to more mission-critical applications, we are in dire need for a common evaluation protocol of explainability methods of GNNs.
In this paper, we propose, to our best knowledge, the first systematic evaluation framework for GNN explainability GraphFramEx, considering explainability on three different "user needs". We propose a unique metric, the characterization score, which combines the fidelity measures and classifies explanations based on their quality of being sufficient or necessary. We scope ourselves to node classification tasks and compare the most representative techniques in the field of input-level explainability for GNNs. We found that personalized PageRank has the best performance for synthetic benchmarks, but gradient-based methods outperform for tasks with complex graph structure. However, none dominates the others on all evaluation dimensions and there is always a trade-off. We further apply our evaluation protocol in a case study for frauds explanation on eBay transaction graphs to reflect the production environment.