Federated learning has emerged as an important paradigm for training machine learning models in different domains. For graph-level tasks such as graph classification, graphs can also be regarded as a special type of data samples, which can be collected and stored in separate local systems. Similar to other domains, multiple local systems, each holding a small set of graphs, may benefit from collaboratively training a powerful graph mining model, such as the popular graph neural networks (GNNs). To provide more motivation towards such endeavors, we analyze real-world graphs from different domains to confirm that they indeed share certain graph properties that are statistically significant compared with random graphs. However, we also find that different sets of graphs, even from the same domain or same dataset, are non-IID regarding both graph structures and node features. To handle this, we propose a graph clustered federated learning (GCFL) framework that dynamically finds clusters of local systems based on the gradients of GNNs, and theoretically justify that such clusters can reduce the structure and feature heterogeneity among graphs owned by the local systems. Moreover, we observe the gradients of GNNs to be rather fluctuating in GCFL which impedes high-quality clustering, and design a gradientmore »
GNNExplainer: Generating Explanations for Graph Neural Networks
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. Here we propose GNNEXPLAINER, the first general, model-agnostic approach for providing interpretable explanations for predictions of any GNN-based model on any graph-based machine learning task. Given an instance, GNNEXPLAINER identifies a compact subgraph structure and a small subset of node features that have a crucial role in GNN’s prediction. Further, GNNEXPLAINER can generate consistent and concise explanations for an entire class of instances. We formulate GNNEXPLAINER as an optimization task that maximizes the mutual information between a GNN’s prediction and distribution of possible subgraph structures. Experiments on synthetic and real-world graphs show that our approach can identify important graph structures as well as node features, and outperforms alternative baseline approaches by up to 43.0% in explanation accuracy. GNNEXPLAINER provides a variety of benefits, from the ability to visualize semantically relevant structures to interpretability, to giving insights into errors of faulty GNNs.
- Award ID(s):
- 1835598
- Publication Date:
- NSF-PAR ID:
- 10198848
- Journal Name:
- Advances in neural information processing systems
- ISSN:
- 1049-5258
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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Accepted Manuscript1.0
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