Josephine Maria Thomas

Silvia Beddar-Wiesing, Giuseppe Alessio D'Inverno, Caterina Graziani et al.

Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) are a large class of relational models for graph processing. Recent theoretical studies on the expressive power of GNNs have focused on two issues. On the one hand, it has been proven that GNNs are as powerful as the Weisfeiler-Lehman test (1-WL) in their ability to distinguish graphs. Moreover, it has been shown that the equivalence enforced by 1-WL equals unfolding equivalence. On the other hand, GNNs turned out to be universal approximators on graphs modulo the constraints enforced by 1-WL/unfolding equivalence. However, these results only apply to Static Attributed Undirected Homogeneous Graphs (SAUHG) with node attributes. In contrast, real-life applications often involve a much larger variety of graph types. In this paper, we conduct a theoretical analysis of the expressive power of GNNs for two other graph domains that are particularly interesting in practical applications, namely dynamic graphs and SAUGHs with edge attributes. Dynamic graphs are widely used in modern applications; hence, the study of the expressive capability of GNNs in this domain is essential for practical reasons and, in addition, it requires a new analyzing approach due to the difference in the architecture of dynamic GNNs compared to static ones. On the other hand, the examination of SAUHGs is of particular relevance since they act as a standard form for all graph types: it has been shown that all graph types can be transformed without loss of information to SAUHGs with both attributes on nodes and edges. This paper considers generic GNN models and appropriate 1-WL tests for those domains. Then, the known results on the expressive power of GNNs are extended to the mentioned domains: it is proven that GNNs have the same capability as the 1-WL test, the 1-WL equivalence equals unfolding equivalence and that GNNs are universal approximators modulo 1-WL/unfolding equivalence.

Josephine Maria Thomas, Alessandro Muscoloni, Sara Ciucci et al.

Complex network topologies and hyperbolic geometry seem specularly connected, and one of the most fascinating and challenging problems of recent complex network theory is to map a given network to its hyperbolic space. The Popularity Similarity Optimization (PSO) model represents - at the moment - the climax of this theory. It suggests that the trade-off between node popularity and similarity is a mechanism to explain how complex network topologies emerge - as discrete samples - from the continuous world of hyperbolic geometry. The hyperbolic space seems appropriate to represent real complex networks. In fact, it preserves many of their fundamental topological properties, and can be exploited for real applications such as, among others, link prediction and community detection. Here, we observe for the first time that a topological-based machine learning class of algorithms - for nonlinear unsupervised dimensionality reduction - can directly approximate the network's node angular coordinates of the hyperbolic model into a two-dimensional space, according to a similar topological organization that we named angular coalescence. On the basis of this phenomenon, we propose a new class of algorithms that offers fast and accurate coalescent embedding of networks in the hyperbolic space even for graphs with thousands of nodes.