Enhancing Graph Structure Learning via Motif-Driven Hypergraph Construction

Graph neural networks (GNNs), as a cutting-edge technology in deep learning, perform particularly well in various tasks that process graph structure data. However, their foundation on pairwise graphs often limits their capacity to capture latent higher-order topological semantic information. Thus, it is crucial to find a way to extract the latent higher-order information of graphs without missing the lower-order information of the original graph. To address this issue, we here develop a method to construct hypergraph based on motifs, and then a novel neural network framework, named MD-HGNN, is proposed for enhanced graph learning. Specifically, we first utilize motifs of the original graph to construct the hypergraph and eliminate nested structures within the hypergraph to prevent information redundancy. Subsequently, GNNs and hypergraph neural networks (HGNNs) are employed separately to extract the lower-order and higher-order topological semantic information of the graph. Finally, the lower-order and higher-order information are integrated to obtain an embedded representation of graph. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that MD-HGNN preserves the original lower-order graph structure information while effectively extracting higher-order features. Moreover, its performance and robustness are validated across different downstream tasks.