NeurIPS 2017

Inductive Representation Learning on Large Graphs

William L. Hamilton, Z. Ying, J. Leskovec

Main figure for Inductive Representation Learning on Large Graphs

Abstract

Low-dimensional embeddings of nodes in large graphs have proved extremely useful in a variety of prediction tasks, from content recommendation to identifying protein functions. However, most existing approaches require that all nodes in the graph are present during training of the embeddings; these previous approaches are inherently transductive and do not naturally generalize to unseen nodes. Here we present GraphSAGE, a general inductive framework that leverages node feature information (e.g., text attributes) to efficiently generate node embeddings for previously unseen data. Instead of training individual embeddings for each node, we learn a function that generates embeddings by sampling and aggregating features from a node's local neighborhood. Our algorithm outperforms strong baselines on three inductive node-classification benchmarks: we classify the category of unseen nodes in evolving information graphs based on citation and Reddit post data, and we show that our algorithm generalizes to completely unseen graphs using a multi-graph dataset of protein-protein interactions.

Benchmark Results

Tested on 2 datasets

Tables show presented results in global context (best 3 papers + GCN + MLP).

Classic

#ModelF1 ↑Paper
1
EnGCN
0.9714 ±0.0003
2
SAGN+SLE
0.9710
3
GAMLP(JK)
0.9704 ±0.0001
14
GraphSAGE
0.9660
53
GraphSAGE-LSTM
0.9540
This paper
69
GraphSAGE-mean
0.9500
This paper
76
GraphSAGE-pool
0.9480
This paper
107
GraphSAGE-GCN
0.9300
This paper
127
DeepWalk + features
0.6910
This paper
132
Raw features
0.5850
This paper
143
DeepWalk
0.3240
This paper
146
Random
0.0430
This paper
#ModelF1 ↑Paper
1
GAMLP(JK)
0.9982 ±0.0001
2
GraphCON-GCN
0.9960
3
GCNII
0.9953 ±0.0001
21
GCN
0.9850
81
Random
actual #81 vs paper #179 98 places worse
0.9517 ±0.0032
best reported
actual #81 vs paper #179 98 places worse
paper 0.3960
paper 0.3960 Δ today 0.5557
154
GraphSAGE-LSTM
0.6120
This paper
157
GraphSAGE-pool
actual #157 vs paper #158 1 place worse
0.6020
best reported
actual #157 vs paper #158 1 place worse
paper 0.6000
158
GraphSAGE-GCN
actual #158 vs paper #167 9 places worse
0.6010
best reported
actual #158 vs paper #167 9 places worse
paper 0.5000
159
GraphSAGE-mean
0.5980
This paper
173
MLP
0.4620
176
Raw features
actual #176 vs paper #177 1 place worse
0.4250 ±0.0030
best reported
actual #176 vs paper #177 1 place worse
paper 0.4220

Difference within reported uncertainty; not counted as underperformance.

paper 0.4220 Δ today 0.0030
SOTA performance (not significantly different from the best) Proposed method (this paper) Baseline / comparison (this paper) Global context (other papers) Best today — OK at publication; today's leaderboard best is elsewhere