Directed Graph Convolutional Network
Abstract
Graph Convolutional Networks (GCNs) have been widely used due to their outstanding performance in processing graph-structured data. However, the undirected graphs limit their application scope. In this paper, we extend spectral-based graph convolution to directed graphs by using first- and second-order proximity, which can not only retain the connection properties of the directed graph, but also expand the receptive field of the convolution operation. A new GCN model, called DGCN, is then designed to learn representations on the directed graph, leveraging both the first- and second-order proximity information. We empirically show the fact that GCNs working only with DGCNs can encode more useful information from graph and help achieve better performance when generalized to other models. Moreover, extensive experiments on citation networks and co-purchase datasets demonstrate the superiority of our model against the state-of-the-art methods.
Benchmark Results
Tested on 3 datasets Non-standard metric on 1 dataset
Tables show presented results in global context (best 3 papers + GCN + MLP).
Classic
| # | Model | Accuracy ↑ | Paper |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | GraphTARIF | 0.9703
±0.0019 | |
| 2 | GAT | 0.9000
±0.0130 | prev best: Measuring and Relieving the Over-smoothing Problem for Graph Neural Networks from the Topological View (AAAI 2019) best today: Graph Transductive Sharpening: Leveraging Unlabeled Predictions in Node Classification (2026) Improvement within reported uncertainty; not highlighted. |
| 3 | GAT+T | 0.9660
±0.0007 | |
| 7 | SAGE | 0.9643
±0.0027 | |
| 8 | GCN | 0.9632
±0.0008 best reported | |
| 50 | SGC | 0.9511
±0.0009 best reported | best at pub: Spectral Graph Attention Network with Fast Eigen-approximation (2020) |
| 56 | GraphSAGE | 0.9508
±0.0026 best reported | best at pub: Measuring and Relieving the Over-smoothing Problem for Graph Neural Networks from the Topological View (AAAI 2019) best today: A Quasi-Wasserstein Loss for Learning Graph Neural Networks (WWW 2023) |
| 119 | ChebNet | 0.9377
±0.0032 best reported | best today: LON-GNN: Spectral GNNs with Learnable Orthonormal Basis (2023) |
| 390 | MLP | 0.9128
±0.0063 | |
| 411 | DGCN | 0.9080
±0.0110 | This paper |
| # | Model | Accuracy ↑ | Paper |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | GraphTARIF | 0.9461
±0.0017 | |
| 2 | GCN | 0.9412
±0.0008 best reported | best at pub: Graph-Revised Convolutional Network (2019) |
| 3 | GAT | 0.9398
±0.0022 best reported | best at pub: Graph-Revised Convolutional Network (2019) |
| 8 | SAGE | 0.9351
±0.0006 | |
| 46 | GraphSAGE | 0.8040
±0.0250 | prev best: Measuring and Relieving the Over-smoothing Problem for Graph Neural Networks from the Topological View (AAAI 2019) best today: Can TabPFN Compete with GNNs for Node Classification via Graph Tabularization? (LoG 2025) Improvement within reported uncertainty; not highlighted. |
| 82 | SGC | 0.9022
±0.0021 best reported | best at pub: Graph-Revised Convolutional Network (2019) |
| 216 | ChebNet | 0.8782
±0.0072 best reported | best today: Node-oriented Spectral Filtering for Graph Neural Networks (2022) |
| 320 | MLP | 0.8463 | |
| 405 | DGCN | 0.8200
±0.0170 | This paper |
Heterogeneous Graph Benchmarks
DBLP
Global leaderboard →Sorted by Accuracy. Highlighted rows are from other papers.
| # | Model | Accuracy ↑ | Paper |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | HG-SCM | 0.9490
±0.0015 | |
| 2 | SeHGNN | 0.9489
±0.0018 | |
| 3 | AdvSynGNN | 0.9486
±0.0012 | |
| 31 | GAT | 0.7180
±0.0260 | prev best: Scattering GCN: Overcoming Oversmoothness in Graph Convolutional Networks (NeurIPS 2020) best today: I'm Me, We're Us, and I'm Us: Tri-directional Contrastive Learning on Hypergraphs (AAAI 2022) |
| 36 | GCN | 0.7150
±0.0270 | prev best: Scattering GCN: Overcoming Oversmoothness in Graph Convolutional Networks (NeurIPS 2020) best today: I'm Me, We're Us, and I'm Us: Tri-directional Contrastive Learning on Hypergraphs (AAAI 2022) |
| 61 | SGC | 0.8170 best reported | best today: Deep Graph Contrastive Representation Learning (2020) |
| 65 | MLP | 0.8118
±0.0020 | |
| 105 | GraphSAGE | 0.7455
±0.0061 best reported | best today: Coden: Efficient Temporal Graph Neural Networks for Continuous Prediction (2026) |
| 109 | DGCN | 0.7250
±0.0250 | This paper |
| 114 | SGC+DGCN | 0.7110
±0.0230 | This paper |
| 118 | ChebNet | 0.6400
±0.0280 | This paper |
