Improving Node Classification through Convolutional Networks Built on Enhanced Message-Passing Graph

Enhancing message propagation is critical for solving the problem of node classification in sparse graph with few labels. The recently popularized Graph Convolutional Network (GCN) lacks the ability to propagate messages effectively to distant nodes because of over-smoothing. Besides, the GCN with numerous trainable parameters suffers from overfitting when the labeled nodes are scarce. This article addresses the problem via building GCN on Enhanced Message-Passing Graph (EMPG). The key idea is that node classification can benefit from various variants of the input graph that can propagate messages more efficiently, based on the assumption that the structure of each variant is reasonable when more unlabeled nodes are labeled properly. Specifically, the proposed method first maps the nodes to a latent space through graph embedding that captures the structural information of the input graph. Considering the node attributes together, the proposed method constructs the EMPG by adding connections between the nodes in close proximity in the latent space. With the help of the added connections, the EMPG allows a node to propagate its message to the right nodes at long distances, so that the GCN built on the EMPG need not stack multiple layers. As a result, over-smoothing is avoided. However, dense connections may cause message propagation saturation and lead to overfitting. Seeing the EMPG as an accumulation of some potential variants of the original graph, the proposed method utilizes dropout to extract a group of variants from the EMPG and then builds multichannel GCNs on them. The multichannel features learned from different dropout EMPGs are aggregated to compute the final prediction jointly. The proposed method is flexible, as a brod range of GCNs can be incorporated easily. Additionally, it is efficient and robust. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method yields improvements in node classification.