Forming an Electoral College for a Graph: a Heuristic Semi-supervised Learning Framework

Recently, graph-based algorithms have drawn much attention because of their impressive success in semi-supervised scenarios. For better model performance, previous studies learn to transform the topology of the input graph. However, these works only focus on optimizing the original nodes and edges, leaving the direction of augmenting existing data unexplored. In this paper, by simulating the generation process of graph signals, we propose a novel heuristic pre-processing technique, namely ELectoral COllege (ELCO), which automatically expands new nodes and edges to refine the label similarity within a dense subgraph. Substantially enlarging the original training set with high-quality generated labeled data, our framework can effectively benefit downstream models. To justify the generality and practicality of ELCO, we couple it with the popular Graph Convolution Network and Graph Attention Network to extensively perform semi-supervised learning evaluations on three standard datasets. In all setups tested, our method boosts the average score of base models by a large margin of 4 points, as well as consistently outperforms the state-of-the-art. Please find our code at https://github.com/RingBDStack/ELCO.