TempME: Towards the Explainability of Temporal Graph Neural Networks via
  Motif Discovery
Jialin Chen Rex Ying
Temporal graphs are widely used to model dynamic systems with time-varying
interactions. In real-world scenarios, the underlying mechanisms of generating
future interactions in dynamic systems are typically governed by a set of
recurring substructures within the graph, known as temporal motifs. Despite the
success and prevalence of current temporal graph neural networks (TGNN), it
remains uncertain which temporal motifs are recognized as the significant
indications that trigger a certain prediction from the model, which is a
critical challenge for advancing the explainability and trustworthiness of
current TGNNs. To address this challenge, we propose a novel approach, called
Temporal Motifs Explainer (TempME), which uncovers the most pivotal temporal
motifs guiding the prediction of TGNNs. Derived from the information bottleneck
principle, TempME extracts the most interaction-related motifs while minimizing
the amount of contained information to preserve the sparsity and succinctness
of the explanation. Events in the explanations generated by TempME are verified
to be more spatiotemporally correlated than those of existing approaches,
providing more understandable insights. Extensive experiments validate the
superiority of TempME, with up to 8.21% increase in terms of explanation
accuracy across six real-world datasets and up to 22.96% increase in boosting
the prediction Average Precision of current TGNNs.