CF-GNNExplainer: Counterfactual Explanations for Graph Neural Networks

Abstract

Given the increasing promise of graph neural networks (GNNs) in real-world applications, several methods have been developed for explaining their predictions. Existing methods for interpreting predictions from GNNs have primarily focused on generating subgraphs that are especially relevant for a particular prediction. However, such methods are not counterfactual (CF) in nature: given a prediction, we want to understand how the prediction can be changed in order to achieve an alternative outcome. In this work, we propose a method for generating CF explanations for GNNs: the minimal perturbation to the input (graph) data such that the prediction changes. Using only edge deletions, we find that our method, CF-GNNExplainer, can generate CF explanations for the majority of instances across three widely used datasets for GNN explanations, while removing less than 3 edges on average, with at least 94\% accuracy. This indicates that CF-GNNExplainer primarily removes edges that are crucial for the original predictions, resulting in minimal CF explanations.

Accepted to AISTATS 2022

Cited by in corpus (6)

• A Comprehensive Survey on Trustworthy Graph Neural Networks: Privacy, Robustness, Fairness, and Explainability
• A Meta-Learning Approach for Training Explainable Graph Neural Networks
• GRETEL: A unified framework for Graph Counterfactual Explanation Evaluation
• Counterfactual Learning on Graphs: A Survey
• Generating Post-hoc Explanations for Skip-gram-based Node Embeddings by Identifying Important Nodes with Bridgeness
• ACGAN-GNNExplainer: Auxiliary Conditional Generative Explainer for Graph Neural Networks