# Understanding the Evaluation¶

This part of the tutorial is aimed to help you understand the evaluation of knowledge graph embeddings. In particular it explains rank-based evaluation metrics reported in pykeen.evaluation.RankBasedMetricResults.

Knowledge graph embedding are usually evaluated on the task of link prediction. To this end, an evaluation set of triples $$\mathcal{T}_{eval} \subset \mathcal{E} \times \mathcal{R} \times \mathcal{E}$$ is provided, and for each triple $$(h, r, t) \in \mathcal{T}_{eval}$$ in this set, two tasks are solved:

• In the right-side prediction task, a pair of head entity and relation are given and aim to predict the tail, i.e. $$(h, r, ?)$$. To this end, the knowledge graph embedding model is used to score each of the possible choices $$(h, r, e)$$ for $$e \in \mathcal{E}$$. Higher scores indicate higher plausibility.

• Analogously, in the left-side prediction task, a pair of relation and tail entity are provided and aim to predict the head, i.e. $$(?, r, t)$$. Again, each possible choice $$(e, r, t)$$ for $$e \in \mathcal{E}$$ is scored according to the knowledge graph embedding model.

Note

Practically, many embedding models allow fast computation of all scores $$(e, r, t)$$ for all $$e \in \mathcal{E}$$, than just passing the triples through the model’s score function. As an example, consider DistMult with the score function $$score(h,r,t)=\sum_{i=1}^d \mathbf{h}_i \cdot \mathbf{r}_i \cdot \mathbf{t}_i$$. Here, all entities can be scored as candidate heads for a given tail and relation by first computing the element-wise product of tail and relation, and then performing a matrix multiplication with the matrix of all entity embeddings. # TODO: Link to section explaining this concept.

## Rank-Based Evaluation¶

In the rank-based evaluation protocol, the scores are used to sort the list of possible choices by decreasing score, and determine the rank of the true choice, i.e. the index in the sorted list. Smaller ranks indicate better performance. Based on these individual ranks, which are obtained for each evaluation triple and each side of the prediction (left/right), there exist several aggregation measures to quantify the performance of a model in a single number.

### Ranking Types¶

While the aforementioned definition of the rank as “the index in the sorted list” is intuitive, it does not specify what happens when there are multiple choices with exactly the same score. Therefore, in previous work, different variants have been implemented, which yield different results in the presence of equal scores.

• The optimistic rank assumes that the true choice is on the first position of all those with equal score.

• The pessimistic rank assumes that the true choice is on the last position of all those with equal score.

• The realistic rank is the mean of the optimistic and the pessimistic rank, and moreover the expected value over all permutations respecting the sort order.

• The non-deterministic rank delegates the decision to the sort algorithm. Thus, the result depends on the internal tie breaking mechanism of the sort algorithm’s implementation.

PyKEEN supports the first three: optimistic, pessimistic and realistic. When only using a single score, the realistic score should be reported. The pessimistic and optimistic rank, or more specific the deviation between both, can be used to detect whether a model predicts exactly equal scores for many choices. There are a few causes such as:

• finite-precision arithmetic in conjunction with explicitly using sigmoid activation

• clamping of scores, e.g. by using a ReLU activation or similar.

### Ranking Sidedness¶

Besides the different rank definitions, PyKEEN also report scores for the individual side predictions.

Side

Explanation

The rank-based metric evaluated only for the head / left-side prediction.

tail

The rank-based metric evaluated only for the tail / right-side prediction.

both

The rank-based metric evaluated on both predictions.

By default, “both” is often used in publications. The side-specific scores can however often give access to interesting insights, such as the difference in difficulty of predicting a head/tail given the rest, or the model’s incapability to solve of one the tasks.

### Filtering¶

The rank-based evaluation allows using the “filtered setting”, which is enabled by default. When evaluating the tail prediction for a triple $$(h, r, t)$$, i.e. scoring all triples $$(h, r, e)$$, there may be additional known triples $$(h, r, t')$$ for $$t \neq t'$$. If the model predicts a higher score for $$(h, r, t')$$, the rank will increase, and hence the measured model performance will decrease. However, giving $$(h, r, t')$$ a high score (and thus a low rank) is desirable since it is a true triple as well. Thus, the filtered evaluation setting ignores for a given triple $$(h, r, t)$$ the scores of all other known true triples $$(h, r, t')$$.

### Entity and Relation Restriction¶

Sometimes, we are only interested in a certain set of entities and/or relations, $$\mathcal{E}_I \subset \mathcal{E}$$ and $$\mathcal{R}_I \subset \mathcal{R}$$ respectively, but have additional information available in form of triples with other entities/relations. As example, we would like to predict whether an actor stars in a movie. Thus, we are only interested in the relation stars_in between entities which are actors/movies. However, we may have additional information available, e.g. who directed the movie, or the movie’s language, which may help in the prediction task. Thus, we would like to train the model on the full dataset including all available relations and entities, but restrict the evaluation to the task we are aiming at.

In order to restrict the evaluation, we proceed as follows:

1. We filter the evaluation triples $$\mathcal{T}_{eval}$$ to contain only those triples which are of interest, i.e. $$\mathcal{T}_{eval}' = \{(h, r, t) \in \mathcal{T}_{eval} \mid h, t \in \mathcal{E}_I, r \in \mathcal{R}_I\}$$

2. During tail prediction/evaluation for a triple $$(h, r, t)$$, we restrict the candidate tail entity $$t'$$ to $$t' \in \mathcal{E}_{eval}$$. Similarly for head prediction/evaluation, we restrict the candidate head entity $$h'$$ to $$h' \in \mathcal{E}_{eval}$$

#### Example¶

The pykeen.datasets.Hetionet is a biomedical knowledge graph containing drugs, genes, diseases, other biological entities, and their interrelations. It was described by Himmelstein et al. in Systematic integration of biomedical knowledge prioritizes drugs for repurposing to support drug repositioning, which translates to the link prediction task between drug and disease nodes.

The edges in the graph are listed here, but we will focus on only the compound treat disease (CtD) and compound palliates disease (CpD) relations during evaluation. This can be done with the following:

from pykeen.pipeline import pipeline

evaluation_relation_whitelist = {'CtD', 'CpD'}
pipeline_result = pipeline(
dataset='Hetionet',
model='RotatE',
evaluation_relation_whitelist=evaluation_relation_whitelist,
)


By restricting evaluation to the edges of interest, models more appropriate for drug repositioning can be identified during hyper-parameter optimization instead of models that are good at predicting all types of relations. The HPO pipeline accepts the same arguments:

from pykeen.hpo import hpo_pipeline

evaluation_relation_whitelist = {'CtD', 'CpD'}
hpo_pipeline_result = hpo_pipeline(
n_trials=30,
dataset='Hetionet',
model='RotatE',
evaluation_relation_whitelist=evaluation_relation_whitelist,
)