Evaluating Link Prediction Explanations for Graph Neural Networks

Intelligent systems in the real world often use machine learning (ML) algorithms to process various types of data. However, graph data present a unique challenge due to their complexity. Graphs are powerful data representations that can naturally describe many real-world scenarios where the focus is on the connections among numerous entities, such as social networks, knowledge graphs, drug-protein interactions, traffic and communication networks, and more [9]. Unlike text, audio, and images, graphs are embedded in an irregular domain, which makes some essential operations of existing ML algorithms inapplicable [17]. GML applications seek to make predictions, or discover new patterns, using graph-structured data as feature information: for example, one might wish to classify the role of a protein in a biological interaction graph, predict the role of a person in a collaboration network, or recommend new friends in a social network.