# Evaluating Link Prediction Explanations for Graph Neural Networks

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2308.01682 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.01682/

## Key facts

- Cited by 2 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 31 of its 51 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 3 Aug 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 31)

- [Grad-CAM: Visual Explanations from Deep Networks via Gradient-based Localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1610.02391/) (2016)
- [How Powerful are Graph Neural Networks?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.00826/) (2018)
- [Axiomatic Attribution for Deep Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.01365/) (2017)
- [Learning Deep Features for Discriminative Localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.04150/) (2015)
- [Deep Inside Convolutional Networks: Visualising Image Classification Models and Saliency Maps](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1312.6034/) (2013)
- [Visualizing and Understanding Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1311.2901/) (2013)
- [node2vec: Scalable Feature Learning for Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1607.00653/) (2016)
- [Graph Neural Networks: A Review of Methods and Applications](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.08434/) (2018)
- [Variational Graph Auto-Encoders](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.07308/) (2016)
- [Geometric Deep Learning: Grids, Groups, Graphs, Geodesics, and Gauges](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.13478/) (2021)
- [SmoothGrad: removing noise by adding noise](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03825/) (2017)
- [Revisiting Semi-Supervised Learning with Graph Embeddings](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1603.08861/) (2016)
- [RISE: Randomized Input Sampling for Explanation of Black-box Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1806.07421/) (2018)
- [Link Prediction Based on Graph Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.09691/) (2018)
- [GNNExplainer: Generating Explanations for Graph Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.03894/) (2019)
- [Parameterized Explainer for Graph Neural Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.04573/) (2020)
- [Hyperbolic Graph Convolutional Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.12933/) (2019)
- [Explainability in Graph Neural Networks: A Taxonomic Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.15445/) (2020)
- [On Explainability of Graph Neural Networks via Subgraph Explorations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.05152/) (2021)
- [Neural Bellman-Ford Networks: A General Graph Neural Network Framework for Link Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.06935/) (2021)
- [To Trust Or Not To Trust A Classifier](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.11783/) (2018)
- [Identity-aware Graph Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.10320/) (2021)
- [Explainability Techniques for Graph Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.13686/) (2019)
- [Machine Learning on Graphs: A Model and Comprehensive Taxonomy](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.03675/) (2020)
- [Interpreting Graph Neural Networks for NLP With Differentiable Edge Masking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.00577/) (2020)
- [CF-GNNExplainer: Counterfactual Explanations for Graph Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.03322/) (2021)
- [Evaluating Explainability for Graph Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.09339/) (2022)
- [Link Prediction with Persistent Homology: An Interactive View](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.10255/) (2021)
- [Probing GNN Explainers: A Rigorous Theoretical and Empirical Analysis of GNN Explanation Methods](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.09078/) (2021)
- [Variational Graph Normalized Auto-Encoders](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.08046/) (2021)

## Built on by (most cited first, 2 of 2)

- [Interpretability of Graph Neural Networks to Assess Effects of Global Change Drivers on Ecological Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.15107/) (2025)
- [Parallelizing Node-Level Explainability in Graph Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.04807/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Graph Machine Learning (GML) has numerous applications, such as node/graph classification and link prediction, in real-world domains. Providing human-understandable explanations for GML models is a challenging yet fundamental task to foster their adoption, but validating explanations for link prediction models has received little attention. In this paper, we provide quantitative metrics to assess the quality of link prediction explanations, with or without ground-truth. State-of-the-art explainability methods for Graph Neural Networks are evaluated using these metrics. We discuss how underlying assumptions and technical details specific to the link prediction task, such as the choice of distance between node embeddings, can influence the quality of the explanations.