GraphHop: An Enhanced Label Propagation Method for Node Classification

A scalable semisupervised node classification method on graph-structured data, called GraphHop, is proposed in this work. The graph contains all nodes’ attributes and link connections but labels of only a subset of nodes. Graph convolutional networks (GCNs) have provided superior performance in node label classification over the traditional label propagation (LP) methods for this problem. Nevertheless, current GCN algorithms suffer from a considerable amount of labels for training because of high model complexity or cannot be easily generalized to large-scale graphs due to the expensive cost of loading the entire graph and node embeddings. Besides, nonlinearity makes the optimization process a mystery. To this end, an enhanced LP method, called GraphHop, is proposed to tackle these problems. GraphHop can be viewed as a smoothening LP algorithm, in which each propagation alternates between two steps: label aggregation and label update. In the label aggregation step, multihop neighbor embeddings are aggregated to the center node. In the label update step, new embeddings are learned and predicted for each node based on aggregated results from the previous step. The two-step iteration improves the graph signal smoothening capacity. Furthermore, to encode attributes, links, and labels on graphs effectively under one framework, we adopt a two-stage training process, i.e., the initialization stage and the iteration stage. Thus, the smooth attribute information extracted from the initialization stage is consistently imposed in the propagation process in the iteration stage. Experimental results show that GraphHop outperforms state-of-the-art graph learning methods on a wide range of tasks in graphs of various sizes (e.g., multilabel and multiclass classification on citation networks, social graphs, and commodity consumption graphs).