aiqbench analysis
This study investigates the reliability of Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) in protein function annotation by analyzing how effective resistance and network topology influence prediction uncertainty across 24 tissue-specific interactomes. The findings indicate that structural degeneration, driven largely by inverse degree rather than biological signal, significantly impacts model performance as network depth increases, offering critical insights into the limits of GNN interpretability in molecular biology applications.
Effective Resistance and Graph Neural Network Reliability in Tissue-Specific Interactomes
arXiv:2610.02175v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Protein function annotation needs to know which predictions to distrust, not only what a model predicts. We ask whether tissue-specific interaction structure carries that information. Our candidate signal is effective resistance, used previously to relieve over-squashing by rewiring. Across 24 tissue-specific interactomes it is dominated by inverse degree, and the degeneration deepens as the co-expression filtered network grows, with a Spearman correlation of -0.955. The residual departure from that limit exceeds degree-preserving null graphs in all 24 networks. Controlling for predictive entropy, degree, annotation cardinality, local structure and feature-only difficulty, the residual explains additional per-node loss in 19 of 24 held-out networks once a permutation floor is subtracted, at every depth, and the effect strengthens monotonically with depth. The increment reaches 0.37% of the variance the controls leave unexplained, 5.6 times a permutation floor, against 1.5 times when the model is retrained in a degree-preserving null world. Selective prediction improves negligibly. The signal is reproducible; degree degeneration bounds it.
Abstract:Protein function annotation needs to know which predictions to distrust, not only what a model predicts. We ask whether tissue-specific interaction structure carries that information. Our candidate signal is effective resistance, used previously to relieve over-squashing by rewiring. Across 24 tissue-specific interactomes it is dominated by inverse degree, and the degeneration deepens as the co-expression filtered network grows, with a Spearman correlation of -0.955. The residual departure from that limit exceeds degree-preserving null graphs in all 24 networks. Controlling for predictive entropy, degree, annotation cardinality, local structure and feature-only difficulty, the residual explains additional per-node loss in 19 of 24 held-out networks once a permutation floor is subtracted, at every depth, and the effect strengthens monotonically with depth. The increment reaches 0.37% of the variance the controls leave unexplained, 5.6 times a permutation floor, against 1.5 times when the model is retrained in a degree-preserving null world. Selective prediction improves negligibly. The signal is reproducible; degree degeneration bounds it.
Machine Learning (cs.LG); Molecular Networks (q-bio.MN)
arXiv:2610.02175 [cs.LG]
(or arXiv:2610.02175v1 [cs.LG] for this version)
https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2610.02175 Focus to learn more arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration)
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