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

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 problems with graph-learning datasets and benchmarking practices—revealing, for example, that methods which ignore the graph structure can outperform 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 addresses these questions. As the classic evaluation 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 ablations*—i.e., quantifying differences between the original dataset and its perturbed representations. Within this framework, we propose two measures—*performance separability* and *mode complementarity*—as evaluation tools, each assessing the capacity of a graph dataset to benchmark the power and efficacy of graph-learning methods 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 improving 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*.