CoDy: Counterfactual Explainers for Dynamic Graphs

Research output: Contribution to book/Conference proceedings/Anthology/ReportConference contributionContributedpeer-review

Contributors

Abstract

Temporal Graph Neural Networks (TGNNs) are widely used to model dynamic systems where relationships and features evolve over time. Although TGNNs demonstrate strong predictive capabilities in these domains, their complex architectures pose significant challenges for explainability. Counterfactual explanation methods provide a promising solution by illustrating how modifications to input graphs can influence model predictions. To address this challenge, we present CoDy—Counterfactual Explainer for Dynamic Graphs—a model-agnostic, instance-level explanation approach that identifies counterfactual subgraphs to interpret TGNN predictions. CoDy employs a search algorithm that combines Monte Carlo Tree Search with heuristic selection policies, efficiently exploring a vast search space of potential explanatory subgraphs by leveraging spatial, temporal, and local event impact information. Extensive experiments against state-of-the-art factual and counterfactual baselines demonstrate CoDy’s effectiveness, with improvements of 16% in AUFSC+ over the strongest baseline. Our code is available at: https://github.com/daniel-gomm/CoDy

Details

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationProceedings of Machine Learning Research
Pages50762-50785
Number of pages24
Volume267
Publication statusPublished - 2025
Peer-reviewedYes

Publication series

SeriesProceedings of Machine Learning Research

Conference

Title42nd International Conference on Machine Learning
Abbreviated titleICML 2025
Conference number42
Duration13 - 19 July 2025
Website
LocationVancouver Convention Center
CityVancouver
CountryCanada

External IDs

ORCID /0000-0001-5458-8645/work/200631676