No Metric to Rule Them All: Toward Principled Evaluations of Graph-Learning Datasets

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A4 Artikkeli konferenssijulkaisussa

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en

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30

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Proceedings of Machine Learning Research, Volume 267, pp. 11405-11434

Abstract

Benchmark datasets have proved pivotal to the success of graph learning, and good benchmark datasets are crucial to guide the development of the field. Recent research has highlighted prob-lems with graph-learning datasets and benchmark-ing practices revealing, for example, that meth-ods which ignore the graph structure can outper-form graph-based approaches. Such findings raise two questions: (1) What makes a good graph-learning dataset, and (2) how can we evaluate dataset quality in graph learning? Our work ad-dresses these questions. As the classic evalua-tion setup uses datasets to evaluate models, it does not apply to dataset evaluation. Hence, we start from first principles. Observing that graph-learning datasets uniquely combine two modes graph structure and node features, we introduce RINGS, a flexible and extensible mode-perturbation framework to assess the quality of graph-learning datasets based on dataset abla-tions ie., quantifying differences between the original dataset and its perturbed representations. Within this framework, we propose two mea-sures performance separability and mode com-plementarity as evaluation tools, each assess-ing the capacity of a graph dataset to benchmark the power and efficacy of graph-learning meth-ods from a distinct angle. We demonstrate the utility of our framework for dataset evaluation via extensive experiments on graph-level tasks and derive actionable recommendations for im-proving the evaluation of graph-learning methods. Our work opens new research directions in data-centric graph learning, and it constitutes a step toward the systematic evaluation of evaluations.

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Publisher Copyright: © 2025 by the author(s).

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Coupette, C, Wayland, J, Simons, E & Rieck, B 2025, 'No Metric to Rule Them All: Toward Principled Evaluations of Graph-Learning Datasets', Proceedings of Machine Learning Research, vol. 267, pp. 11405-11434. < https://proceedings.mlr.press/v267/coupette25a.html >