Effective Resistance and Graph Neural Network Reliability in Tissue-Specific Interactomes
This study addresses the lack of theoretical grounding for assessing the reliability of graph neural networks (GNNs) in protein function prediction, specifically investigating whether tissue-specific network structures can provide node-level prediction confidence. By leveraging effective resistance to quantify GNN reliability within tissue-specific interactomes, this work reveals its degeneration into inverse node degree. Through null model testing and a selective prediction framework, it analyzes the explanatory power of residual signals—obtained after removing degree effects—on prediction errors. The findings demonstrate that these residual signals independently explain node-wise loss, with their explanatory variance increasing monotonically with network depth and reaching 5.6 times that of permutation baselines. This research establishes the first topology-based node-level confidence metric, uncovering both the degree-degeneration limitation of effective resistance and the robustness of residual signals.