Edgeless-GNN: Unsupervised Representation Learning for Edgeless Nodes

We study the problem of embedding
edgeless
nodes such as users who newly enter the underlying network, while using graph neural networks (GNNs) widely studied for effective representation learning of graphs. Our study is motivated by the fact that GNNs cannot be straightforwardly adopted for our problem since message passing to such edgeless nodes having no connections is impossible. To tackle this challenge, we propose
$\mathsf{Edgeless-GNN}$
, a novel inductive framework that enables GNNs to generate node embeddings even for edgeless nodes through
unsupervised learning
. Specifically, we start by constructing a proxy graph based on the similarity of node attributes as the GNN's computation graph defined by the underlying network. The known network structure is used to train model parameters, whereas a
topology-aware
loss function is established such that our model judiciously learns the network structure by encoding positive, negative, and second-order relations between nodes. For the edgeless nodes, we
inductively
infer embeddings by expanding the computation graph. By evaluating the performance of various downstream machine learning tasks, we empirically demonstrate that
$\mathsf{Edgeless-GNN}$
exhibits (a) superiority over state-of-the-art inductive network embedding methods for edgeless nodes, (b) effectiveness of our topology-aware loss function, (c) robustness to incomplete node attributes, and (d) a linear scaling with the graph size.