DGExplainer: Explaining Dynamic Graph Neural Networks via Relevance Back-propagation
DGExplainer: Explaining Dynamic Graph Neural Networks via Relevance Back-propagation
Yezi Liu, Jiaxuan Xie, Yanning Shen
Proceedings of the Thirty-Fourth International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence
Main Track. Pages 3135-3143.
https://doi.org/10.24963/ijcai.2025/349
Dynamic graph neural networks (dynamic GNNs) have demonstrated remarkable effectiveness in analyzing time-varying graph-structured data. However, their black-box nature often hinders users from understanding their predictions, which can limit their applications. In recent years, there has been a surge in research aimed at explaining GNNs, but most studies have focused on static graphs, leaving the explanation of dynamic GNNs relatively unexplored. Explaining dynamic GNNs presents a unique challenge due to their complex spatial and temporal structures. As a result, existing approaches designed for explaining static graphs are not directly applicable to dynamic graphs because they ignore temporal dependencies among graph snapshots. To address this issue, we propose DGExplainer, which offers a reliable explanation of dynamic GNN predictions. DGExplainer utilizes the relevance back-propagation technique both time-wise and layer-wise. Specifically, it incorporates temporal information by computing the relevance of node representations along the inverse of the time evolution. Additionally, for each time step, it calculates layer-wise relevance from a graph-based module by redistributing the relevance of node representations along the back-propagation path. Quantitative and qualitative experimental results on six real-world datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of DGExplainer in identifying important nodes for link prediction and node regression in dynamic GNNs.
Keywords:
Data Mining: DM: Mining graphs
AI Ethics, Trust, Fairness: ETF: Explainability and interpretability
AI Ethics, Trust, Fairness: ETF: Trustworthy AI
Machine Learning: ML: Explainable/Interpretable machine learning
