GNNEvaluator: Evaluating GNN Performance On Unseen Graphs Without Labels

Abstract

Evaluating the performance of graph neural networks (GNNs) is an essential task for practical GNN model deployment and serving, as deployed GNNs face significant performance uncertainty when inferring on unseen and unlabeled test graphs, due to mismatched training-test graph distributions. In this paper, we study a new problem, GNN model evaluation, that aims to assess the performance of a specific GNN model trained on labeled and observed graphs, by precisely estimating its performance (e.g., node classification accuracy) on unseen graphs without labels. Concretely, we propose a two-stage GNN model evaluation framework, including (1) DiscGraph set construction and (2) GNNEvaluator training and inference. The DiscGraph set captures wide-range and diverse graph data distribution discrepancies through a discrepancy measurement function, which exploits the GNN outputs of latent node embeddings and node class predictions. Under the effective training supervision from the DiscGraph set, GNNEvaluator learns to precisely estimate node classification accuracy of the to-be-evaluated GNN model and makes an accurate inference for evaluating GNN model performance. Extensive experiments on real-world unseen and unlabeled test graphs demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed method for GNN model evaluation.