Graph-based Integrated Gradients for Explaining Graph Neural Networks
Lachlan Simpson, Kyle Millar, Adriel Cheng, Cheng-Chew Lim, Hong Gunn Chew
公開日: 2025/9/9
Abstract
Integrated Gradients (IG) is a common explainability technique to address the black-box problem of neural networks. Integrated gradients assumes continuous data. Graphs are discrete structures making IG ill-suited to graphs. In this work, we introduce graph-based integrated gradients (GB-IG); an extension of IG to graphs. We demonstrate on four synthetic datasets that GB-IG accurately identifies crucial structural components of the graph used in classification tasks. We further demonstrate on three prevalent real-world graph datasets that GB-IG outperforms IG in highlighting important features for node classification tasks.