cs.LGOct 5, 2026

Interpretable Hypergraph Learning via Neural Additive Models

Authors: Shihan Feng, Xin Zheng, Shiyi Yang, Ren Wang, Chudi Zhong, Can Chen

Organizations: School of Data and Information Sciences, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Chapel Hill, NC 27599, USA · Department of Biostatistics, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Chapel Hill, NC 27599, USA · Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Illinois Institute of Technology, Chicago, IL 60616, USA · School of Data and Information Sciences and the Department of Statistics and Operations Research, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Chapel Hill, NC 27599, USA · School of Data and Information Sciences, the Department of Mathematics, and the Department of Biostatistics, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Chapel Hill, NC 27599, USA

Abstract

Hypergraphs offer a natural framework for modeling networked data, where dependencies among entities are governed by higher-order interactions. While hypergraph learning methods such as hypergraph neural networks have demonstrated remarkable predictive performance, most existing approaches rely on black-box message-passing architectures, making it difficult to disentangle the contributions of node attributes and higher-order structural information. To address this challenge, we introduce the hypergraph neural additive network (HGNAN), an inherently interpretable framework for learning on hypergraph-structured data. HGNAN extends classical neural additive models to higher-order relational data by integrating feature-wise nonlinear decomposition with hypergraph-aware structural aggregation, enabling transparent prediction for both node- and hyperedge-level tasks. Extensive experiments on benchmark datasets demonstrate that HGNAN achieves performance comparable with state-of-the-art hypergraph learning methods while providing intrinsic and meaningful interpretability.

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