Aside from graph neural networks (GNNs) catching significant attention as a powerful framework revolutionizing graph representation learning, there has been an increasing demand for explaining GNN models. Although various explanation methods for GNNs have been developed, most studies have focused on instance-level explanations, which produce explanations tailored to a given graph instance. In our study, we propose Prototype-bAsed GNN-Explainer (PAGE), a novel model-level GNN explanation method that explains what the underlying GNN model has learned for graph classification by discovering human-interpretable prototype graphs. Our method produces explanations for a given class, thus being capable of offering more concise and comprehensive explanations than those of instance-level explanations. First, PAGE selects embeddings of class-discriminative input graphs on the graph-level embedding space after clustering them. Then, PAGE discovers a common subgraph pattern by iteratively searching for high matching node tuples using node-level embeddings via a prototype scoring function, thereby yielding a prototype graph as our explanation. Using five graph classification datasets, we demonstrate that PAGE qualitatively and quantitatively outperforms the state-of-the-art model-level explanation method. We also carry out experimental studies systematically by showing the relationship between PAGE and instance-level explanation methods, the robustness of PAGE to input data scarce environments, and the computational efficiency of the proposed prototype scoring function in PAGE.

本研究提出一种原型图解释方法（PAGE），通过发现人类可解释的原型图来解释GNN模型在图分类中所学到的内容，从而提供比基于实例的解释更为简洁和全面的解释，PAGE表现比基于模型的其他解释方法更为优秀，具有稳健性和计算效率。

基于原型的模型级解释：图神经网络