A Flexible Generative Framework for Graph-based Semi-supervised Learning
This addresses semi-supervised learning on graphs, which is important for applications like social network analysis or recommendation systems, but it appears incremental as it builds on existing generative and variational inference techniques.
The paper tackles the problem of making predictions for unlabeled graph-structured data using a small set of labeled samples by proposing a flexible generative framework that models the joint distribution of node features, labels, and graph structure. Results show that the proposed methods outperform state-of-the-art models on benchmark datasets.
We consider a family of problems that are concerned about making predictions for the majority of unlabeled, graph-structured data samples based on a small proportion of labeled samples. Relational information among the data samples, often encoded in the graph/network structure, is shown to be helpful for these semi-supervised learning tasks. However, conventional graph-based regularization methods and recent graph neural networks do not fully leverage the interrelations between the features, the graph, and the labels. In this work, we propose a flexible generative framework for graph-based semi-supervised learning, which approaches the joint distribution of the node features, labels, and the graph structure. Borrowing insights from random graph models in network science literature, this joint distribution can be instantiated using various distribution families. For the inference of missing labels, we exploit recent advances of scalable variational inference techniques to approximate the Bayesian posterior. We conduct thorough experiments on benchmark datasets for graph-based semi-supervised learning. Results show that the proposed methods outperform the state-of-the-art models in most settings.