Bayesian graph convolutional network with partial observations

Abstract

As a widely studied model in the machine learning and data processing society, graph convolutional network reveals its advantage in non-grid data processing. However, existing graph convolutional networks generally assume that the node features can be fully observed. This may violate the fact that many real applications come with only the pairwise relationships and the corresponding node features are unavailable. In this paper, a novel graph convolutional network model based on Bayesian framework is proposed to handle the graph node classification task without relying on node features. First, we equip the graph node with the pseudo-features generated from the stochastic process. Then, a hidden space structure preservation term is proposed and embedded into the generation process to maintain the independent and identically distributed property between the training and testing dataset. Although the model inference is challenging, we derive an efficient training and predication algorithm using variational inference. Experiments on different datasets demonstrate the proposed graph convolutional networks can significantly outperform traditional methods, achieving an average performance improvement of 9%.