Neighborhood Enlargement in Graph Neural Networks

Graph Neural Network (GNN) is an effective framework for representation learning and prediction for graph structural data. A neighborhood aggregation scheme is applied in the training of GNN and variants, that representation of each node is calculated through recursively aggregating and transforming representation of the neighboring nodes. A variety of GNNS and the variants are build and have achieved state-of-the-art results on both node and graph classification tasks. However, despite common neighborhood which is used in the state-of-the-art GNN models, there is little analysis on the properties of the neighborhood in the neighborhood aggregation scheme. Here, we analyze the properties of the node, edges, and neighborhood of the graph model. Our results characterize the efficiency of the common neighborhood used in the state-of-the-art GNNs, and show that it is not sufficient for the representation learning of the nodes. We propose a simple neighborhood which is likely to be more sufficient. We empirically validate our theoretical analysis on a number of graph classification benchmarks and demonstrate that our methods achieve state-of-the-art performance on listed benchmarks. The implementation code is available at \url{https://github.com/CODE-SUBMIT/Neighborhood-Enlargement-in-Graph-Network}.