PGM-Explainer: Probabilistic Graphical Model Explanations for Graph Neural Networks

In Graph Neural Networks (GNNs), the graph structure is incorporated into the\nlearning of node representations. This complex structure makes explaining GNNs'\npredictions become much more challenging. In this paper, we propose\nPGM-Explainer, a Probabilistic Graphical Model (PGM) model-agnostic explainer\nfor GNNs. Given a prediction to be explained, PGM-Explainer identifies crucial\ngraph components and generates an explanation in form of a PGM approximating\nthat prediction. Different from existing explainers for GNNs where the\nexplanations are drawn from a set of linear functions of explained features,\nPGM-Explainer is able to demonstrate the dependencies of explained features in\nform of conditional probabilities. Our theoretical analysis shows that the PGM\ngenerated by PGM-Explainer includes the Markov-blanket of the target\nprediction, i.e. including all its statistical information. We also show that\nthe explanation returned by PGM-Explainer contains the same set of independence\nstatements in the perfect map. Our experiments on both synthetic and real-world\ndatasets show that PGM-Explainer achieves better performance than existing\nexplainers in many benchmark tasks.\n

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