Traffexplainer: A Framework Toward GNN-Based Interpretable Traffic Prediction

With the increasing traffic congestion problems in metropolises, traffic prediction plays an essential role in intelligent traffic systems. Notably, various deep learning models, especially graph neural networks (GNNs), achieve state-of-the-art performance in traffic prediction tasks but still lack interpretability. To interpret the critical information abstracted by traffic prediction models, we proposed a flexible framework termed Traffexplainer toward GNN-based interpretable traffic prediction. Traffexplainer is applicable to a wide range of GNNs without making any modifications to the original model structure. The framework consists of the GNN-based traffic prediction model and the perturbation-based hierarchical interpretation generator. Specifically, the hierarchical spatial mask and temporal mask are introduced to perturb the prediction model by modulating the values of input data. Then the prediction losses are backward propagated to the masks, which can identify the most critical features for traffic prediction, and further improve the prediction performance. We deploy the framework with five representative GNN-based traffic prediction models and analyze their prediction and interpretation performance on three real-world traffic flow datasets. The experiment results demonstrate that our framework can generate effective and faithful interpretations for GNN-based traffic prediction models, and also improve the prediction performance. The code will be publicly available at <uri xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">https://github.com/lingbai-kong/Traffexplainer</uri>.