Heterogeneous Temporal Graph Neural Network Explainer

Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have been a prominent research area and have been widely deployed in various high-stakes applications in recent years, leading to a growing demand for explanations. While existing explainer methods focus on explaining homogeneous and static GNNs, none of them have attempted to explain heterogeneous temporal GNNs. However, in practice, many real-world databases should be represented as heterogeneous temporal graphs (HTGs), which serve as the fundamental data structure for GNN backbone models in applications. To address this gap, in this paper, we propose HTGExplainer, a novel method for explaining heterogeneous temporal GNNs by considering temporal dependencies and preserving heterogeneity when generating subgraphs as explanations. HTGExplainer employs a deep neural network to re-parameterize the generation process of explanations and incorporates effective heterogeneous and temporal edge embeddings to capture informative semantics used for generating explanatory subgraphs. Extensive experiments are conducted on multiple HTG datasets constructed from real-world scenarios, and the results demonstrate the superior performance of HTGExplainer compared to state-of-the-art baselines.