{"about":{"site":"https://codewithpapers.app","non_affiliation":"Code with Papers and Syntology are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Papers with Code, Meta, or the pwc-archive mirror.","licence":"CC BY-SA 4.0","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","attribution":"https://codewithpapers.app/attribution","modified":"archive material modified by Syntology; see the attribution page"},"url":"/paper/counterfactual-explanations-for-graph","title":"Counterfactual Explanations for Graph Classification Through the Lenses of Density","arxiv_id":"2307.14849","date":"2023-07-27","proceeding":null,"authors":["Carlo Abrate","Giulia Preti","Francesco Bonchi"],"abstract":"Counterfactual examples have emerged as an effective approach to produce simple and understandable post-hoc explanations. In the context of graph classification, previous work has focused on generating counterfactual explanations by manipulating the most elementary units of a graph, i.e., removing an existing edge, or adding a non-existing one. In this paper, we claim that such language of explanation might be too fine-grained, and turn our attention to some of the main characterizing features of real-world complex networks, such as the tendency to close triangles, the existence of recurring motifs, and the organization into dense modules. We thus define a general density-based counterfactual search framework to generate instance-level counterfactual explanations for graph classifiers, which can be instantiated with different notions of dense substructures. In particular, we show two specific instantiations of this general framework: a method that searches for counterfactual graphs by opening or closing triangles, and a method driven by maximal cliques. We also discuss how the general method can be instantiated to exploit any other notion of dense substructures, including, for instance, a given taxonomy of nodes. We evaluate the effectiveness of our approaches in 7 brain network datasets and compare the counterfactual statements generated according to several widely-used metrics. Results confirm that adopting a semantic-relevant unit of change like density is essential to define versatile and interpretable counterfactual explanation methods.","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2307.14849v1","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2307.14849v1.pdf","source":{"archive":"pwc-archive (Hugging Face), CC BY-SA 4.0","snapshot":"2025-07-28","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","row_kind":"abstracts"},"code_links":[{"paper_slug":"counterfactual-explanations-for-graph","repo_url":"https://github.com/carlo-abrate/Counterfactual-Explanations-for-Graph-Classification-Through-the-Lenses-of-Density","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":0,"mentioned_in_github":0,"framework":"none","reach":null}],"tasks":[{"task_slug":"counterfactual-explanation","task_name":"Counterfactual Explanation"},{"task_slug":"graph-classification","task_name":"Graph Classification"},{"task_slug":null,"task_name":"counterfactual"}],"methods":[],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"atlas_url":null,"mcp":null,"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers"},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}