2021/08/26 by Enyan Dai, Suhang Wang, Dai, Enyan +1 · 4 citations
Computer Science · #Advanced Graph Neural Networks #Explainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI) #FOS: Computer and information sciences #Machine Learning (cs.LG) #Machine Learning in Healthcare
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2108.12055
openalex publication_date 2021/08/26 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
Graph Neural Networks (GNNs), which generalize the deep neural networks to graph-structured data, have achieved great success in modeling graphs. However, as an extension of deep learning for graphs, GNNs lack explainability, which largely limits their adoption in scenarios that demand the transparency of models. Though many efforts are taken to improve the explainability of deep learning, they mainly focus on i.i.d data, which cannot be directly applied to explain the predictions of GNNs because GNNs utilize both node features and graph topology to make predictions. There are only very few work on the explainability of GNNs and they focus on post-hoc explanations. Since post-hoc explanations are not directly obtained from the GNNs, they can be biased and misrepresent the true explanations. Therefore, in this paper, we study a novel problem of self-explainable GNNs which can simultaneously give predictions and explanations. We propose a new framework which can find K-nearest labeled nodes for each unlabeled node to give explainable node classification, where nearest labeled nodes are found by interpretable similarity module in terms of both node similarity and local structure similarity. Extensive experiments on real-world and synthetic datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed framework for explainable node classification.