Graphs are ubiquitous due to their flexibility in representing social and technological systems as networks of interacting elements. Graph representation learning methods, such as node embeddings, are powerful approaches to map nodes into a latent vector space, allowing their use for various graph tasks. Despite their success, only few studies have focused on explaining node embeddings locally. Moreover, global explanations of node embeddings remain unexplored, limiting interpretability and debugging potentials. We address this gap by developing human-understandable explanations for dimensions in node embeddings. Towards that, we first develop new metrics that measure the global interpretability of embedding vectors based on the marginal contribution of the embedding dimensions to predicting graph structure. We say that an embedding dimension is more interpretable if it can faithfully map to an understandable sub-structure in the input graph - like community structure. Having observed that standard node embeddings have low interpretability, we then introduce DINE (Dimension-based Interpretable Node Embedding), a novel approach that can retrofit existing node embeddings by making them more interpretable without sacrificing their task performance. We conduct extensive experiments on synthetic and real-world graphs and show that we can simultaneously learn highly interpretable node embeddings with effective performance in link prediction.

通过开发解释节点嵌入维度的人类可理解的解释，我们提出了一种新方法，用于改进现有的节点嵌入模型的解释性，同时保持其在链接预测方面的有效性。

DINE: 节点嵌入的维度可解释性