Interpretable Hypergraph Learning via Neural Additive Models
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.
Figures & tables
| Method | Zoo | Mushroom | NTU2012 | Cora | Pokec | Actor | Avg. Rank |
| MLP | 0.935 0.035 | 1.000 0.000 | 0.883 0.012 | 0.744 0.019 | 0.597 0.007 | 0.868 0.005 | 4.8 |
| AllDeepSets | 0.946 0.031 | 0.999 0.001 | 0.876 0.011 | 0.767 0.016 | 0.587 0.006 | 0.847 0.007 | 6.5 |
| AllSetTransformer | 0.969 0.041 | 0.999 0.001 | 0.884 0.010 | 0.792 0.020 | 0.587 0.007 | 0.855 0.005 | 3.4 |
| HGNN | 0.950 0.042 | 0.998 0.001 | 0.872 0.017 | 0.784 0.012 | 0.580 0.006 | 0.768 0.005 | 7.5 |
| HyperGCN | 0.423 0.000 | 0.482 0.000 | 0.765 0.031 | 0.781 0.022 | 0.581 0.008 | 0.623 0.000 | 9.7 |
| UniGCNII | 0.958 0.047 | 0.999 0.001 | 0.891 0.011 | 0.787 0.014 | 0.587 0.008 | 0.829 0.006 | 4.3 |
| Method | iAF1260b | iJR904 | iSB619 | iYO844 |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| CHESHIRE | ||||
| NHP | ||||
| HyperSAGNN | ||||
| HGNAN (ours) |
| Zoo | NTU2012 | Cora | Pokec | iJR904 | iSB619 | |||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Model | AUROC | AUPRC | AUROC | AUPRC | AUROC | AUPRC | AUROC | AUPRC | AUROC | AUPRC | AUROC | AUPRC |
| HGNAN (full) | ||||||||||||
| w/o Aggregation (NAM) | ||||||||||||
| w/o Additive Structure | ||||||||||||
| w/o Node Features | ||||||||||||
Appendix figures & tables11 assets
Supplementary material from the paper’s appendix.
Appendix
| NTU2012 | Mushroom | Zoo | Cora | Pokec | Actor | |
| 2012 | 8124 | 101 | 2708 | 14998 | 16255 | |
| 2012 | 298 | 43 | 1579 | 2406 | 10164 | |
| # feature | 100 | 22 | 16 | 1433 | 65 | 50 |
| # class | 67 | 2 | 7 | 7 | 2 | 3 |
| 5 | 5 | 93 | 5 | 7 | 28 | |
| 5 | 1 | 2 | 2 | 2 | 1 |
| iAF1260b | iJR904 | iSB619 | iYO844 | |
| 2388 | 1075 | 743 | 1250 | |
| 1668 | 761 | 655 | 990 | |
| Missing Rate | 0.236 | 0.088 | 0.171 | 0.160 |
| 67 | 56 | 61 | 63 | |
| 1 | 1 | 1 | 1 | |
| 3.88 | 4.18 | 5.14 | 4.19 |
| Metric | Method | iAF1260b | iJR904 | iSB619 | iYO844 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| AUROC | CHESHIRE | ||||
| NHP | |||||
| HyperSAGNN | |||||
| HGNAN-edge (167-d) | |||||
| HGNAN-edge (504-d) | |||||
| Accuracy | CHESHIRE |
| HGNAN | Gradient Input | Random | ||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Dataset | COMP@20% | SUFF@20% | COMP@20% | SUFF@20% | COMP@20% | SUFF@20% |
| NTU2012 | ||||||
| Zoo | ||||||
| Pokec | ||||||
| Metric | HGNAN | Gradient Input | Random | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| COMP | 0.10 | |||
| 0.20 | ||||
| 0.30 | ||||
| 0.40 | ||||
| 0.50 | ||||
| 0.60 |
| Dataset | Importance Prob | Random Prob | Ratio | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| NTU2012 | 1 | |||
| 3 | ||||
| 10 | ||||
| 20 | ||||
| Pokec | 1 | |||
| 3 |
| Dataset | HGNAN | Gradient Input | Random |
|---|---|---|---|
| iAF1260b | 30.4 | 25.3 | 3.0 |
| iJR904 | 29.5 | 36.4 | 2.4 |
| iSB619 | 16.9 | 5.4 | 1.0 |
| iYO844 | 26.8 | 35.5 | 1.7 |
| Dataset | Remove self | Remove all context | Context/self |
|---|---|---|---|
| iAF1260b | 26.6% | ||
| iJR904 | 9.5% | ||
| iSB619 | 21.1% | ||
| iYO844 | 11.2% |
| Dataset | Removal | ||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| iAF1260b | HGNAN | 0.97 | 2.78 | 3.76 | 4.70 | 4.86 | 4.89 |
| Random | 0.00 | -0.00 | -0.00 | 0.00 | 0.00 | 0.01 | |
| iJR904 | HGNAN | 0.20 | 0.38 | 0.46 | 0.51 | 0.62 | 0.73 |
| Random | 0.00 | 0.00 | 0.01 | 0.00 | 0.01 | 0.01 | |
| iSB619 | HGNAN | 0.22 | 1.22 | 2.63 | 5.04 | 4.57 | 4.94 |
| Random | -0.00 | 0.00 | 0.01 | 0.02 | 0.04 | 0.03 |
| Training Data | Testing Data | NHP | HyperSAGNN | CHESHIRE | HGNAN-edge |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| iAF1260b | iJR904 | ||||
| iAF1260b | iSB619 | ||||
| iAF1260b | iYO844 | ||||
| iJR904 | iAF1260b | ||||
| iJR904 | iSB619 | ||||
| iJR904 | iYO844 |