GOAt: Explaining Graph Neural Networks via Graph Output Attribution
Shengyao Lu Keith G. Mills Jiao He Bang Liu Di Niu
Understanding the decision-making process of Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) is
crucial to their interpretability. Most existing methods for explaining GNNs
typically rely on training auxiliary models, resulting in the explanations
remain black-boxed. This paper introduces Graph Output Attribution (GOAt), a
novel method to attribute graph outputs to input graph features, creating GNN
explanations that are faithful, discriminative, as well as stable across
similar samples. By expanding the GNN as a sum of scalar products involving
node features, edge features and activation patterns, we propose an efficient
analytical method to compute contribution of each node or edge feature to each
scalar product and aggregate the contributions from all scalar products in the
expansion form to derive the importance of each node and edge. Through
extensive experiments on synthetic and real-world data, we show that our method
not only outperforms various state-ofthe-art GNN explainers in terms of the
commonly used fidelity metric, but also exhibits stronger discriminability, and
stability by a remarkable margin.