MINDWALC: mining interpretable, discriminative walks for classification of nodes in a knowledge graph

BACKGROUND: Leveraging graphs for machine learning tasks can result in more expressive power as extra information is added to the data by explicitly encoding relations between entities. Knowledge graphs are multi-relational, directed graph representations of domain knowledge. Recently, deep learning-based techniques have been gaining a lot of popularity. They can directly process these type of graphs or learn a low-dimensional numerical representation. While it has been shown empirically that these techniques achieve excellent predictive performances, they lack interpretability. This is of vital importance in applications situated in critical domains, such as health care. METHODS: We present a technique that mines interpretable walks from knowledge graphs that are very informative for a certain classification problem. The walks themselves are of a specific format to allow for the creation of data structures that result in very efficient mining. We combine this mining algorithm with three different approaches in order to classify nodes within a graph. Each of these approaches excels on different dimensions such as explainability, predictive performance and computational runtime. RESULTS: We compare our techniques to well-known state-of-the-art black-box alternatives on four benchmark knowledge graph data sets. Results show that our three presented approaches in combination with the proposed mining algorithm are at least competitive to the black-box alternatives, even often outperforming them, while being interpretable. CONCLUSIONS: The mining of walks is an interesting alternative for node classification in knowledge graphs. Opposed to the current state-of-the-art that uses deep learning techniques, it results in inherently interpretable or transparent models without a sacrifice in terms of predictive performance.