Graph Learning: A Comprehensive Survey and Future Directions

Graph learning aims to learn complex relationships among nodes and the topological structure of graphs, such as social networks, academic networks and e-commerce networks, which are common in the real world. Those relationships make graphs special compared with traditional tabular data in which nodes are dependent on non-Euclidean space and contain rich information to explore. Graph learning developed from graph theory to graph data mining and now is empowered with representation learning, making it achieve great performances in various scenarios, even including text, image, chemistry, and biology. Due to the broad application prospects in the real world, graph learning has become a popular and promising area in machine learning. Thousands of works have been proposed to solve various kinds of problems in graph learning and is appealing more and more attention in academic community, which makes it pivotal to survey previous valuable works. Although some of the researchers have noticed this phenomenon and finished impressive surveys on graph learning. However, they failed to link related objectives, methods and applications in a more logical way and cover current ample scenarios as well as challenging problems due to the rapid expansion of the graph learning.