In recent years, considerable progress has been made on improving the interpretability of machine learning models. This is essential, as complex deep learning models with millions of parameters produce state of the art results, but it can be nearly impossible to explain their predictions. While various explainability techniques have achieved impressive results, nearly all of them assume each data instance to be independent and identically distributed (iid). This excludes relational models, such as Statistical Relational Learning (SRL), and the recently popular Graph Neural Networks (GNNs), resulting in few options to explain them. While there does exist one work on explaining GNNs, GNN-Explainer, they assume access to the gradients of the model to learn explanations, which is restrictive in terms of its applicability across non-differentiable relational models and practicality. In this work, we develop RelEx, a model-agnostic relational explainer to explain black-box relational models with only access to the outputs of the black-box. RelEx is able to explain any relational model, including SRL models and GNNs. We compare RelEx to the state-of-the-art relational explainer, GNN-Explainer, and relational extensions of iid explanation models and show that RelEx achieves comparable or better performance, while remaining model-agnostic.

GNN-Explainer is the first general tool for explaining predictions made by graph neural networks (GNNs). Given a trained GNN model and an instance as its input, the GNN-Explainer produces an explanation of the GNN model prediction via a compact subgraph structure, as well as a set of feature dimensions important for its prediction. Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) are a powerful tool for machine learning on graphs. GNNs combine node feature information with the graph structure by recursively passing neural messages along edges of the input graph. However, incorporating both graph structure and feature information leads to complex models and explaining predictions made by GNNs remains unsolved.