Heterogeneous Graph Tree Networks
This work addresses a bottleneck in heterogeneous graph analysis for researchers and practitioners, offering an efficient alternative to meta-path-based methods, though it is incremental in advancing existing graph neural network architectures.
The authors tackled the problem of limited high-order neighborhood capture in heterogeneous graph neural networks by proposing two tree-based models, HetGTCN and HetGTAN, which achieved state-of-the-art performance on semi-supervised node classification tasks across three real-world datasets.
Heterogeneous graph neural networks (HGNNs) have attracted increasing research interest in recent three years. Most existing HGNNs fall into two classes. One class is meta-path-based HGNNs which either require domain knowledge to handcraft meta-paths or consume huge amount of time and memory to automatically construct meta-paths. The other class does not rely on meta-path construction. It takes homogeneous convolutional graph neural networks (Conv-GNNs) as backbones and extend them to heterogeneous graphs by introducing node-type- and edge-type-dependent parameters. Regardless of the meta-path dependency, most existing HGNNs employ shallow Conv-GNNs such as GCN and GAT to aggregate neighborhood information, and may have limited capability to capture information from high-order neighborhood. In this work, we propose two heterogeneous graph tree network models: Heterogeneous Graph Tree Convolutional Network (HetGTCN) and Heterogeneous Graph Tree Attention Network (HetGTAN), which do not rely on meta-paths to encode heterogeneity in both node features and graph structure. Extensive experiments on three real-world heterogeneous graph data demonstrate that the proposed HetGTCN and HetGTAN are efficient and consistently outperform all state-of-the-art HGNN baselines on semi-supervised node classification tasks, and can go deep without compromising performance.