Multistructure Graph Classification Method With Attention-Based Pooling

Graph neural networks (GNNs) have achieved effective performance in many graph-related tasks involving recommendation systems, social networks, and bioinformatics. Recent studies have proposed several graph pooling operators to obtain graph-level representations from node representations. Nevertheless, they usually adopt a single strategy to evaluate the importance of nodes, which may generate node rankings with weak robustness. Also, they cannot capture the different substructures of a graph since they shrink the graph layer by layer. To solve the above problems, this article proposes a Multistructure graph classification method with Attention mechanism and Convolutional neural network (CNN), called MAC. In particular, we propose a novel pooling operator, which adopts multiple strategies to evaluate the importance of nodes and updates node representations through an attention mechanism. Also, we design a hierarchical architecture for MAC to capture multiple different substructures of a graph. To further reduce the loss of graph information, we utilize 2-D CNN to generate a graph-level representation. Comparative experiments are performed on public benchmark datasets deriving from social systems, and the experimental results indicate that our method outperforms a range of state-of-the-art graph classification methods.