TreeXGNN: can gradient-boosted decision trees help boost heterogeneous graph neural networks?

Graph neural networks are a promising deep learning method that can apply graph structures to various tasks. In real-world scenarios, we often have heterogeneous graphs, wherein different node and edge types capture complex interactions between nodes. High-dimensional node features provide rich information about the target nodes. Conventional heterogeneous graph neural networks (HGNN) focus more on graph structures than node features and may have difficulties extracting knowledge from complex node features. In this study, we propose a novel framework, the tree-boosted heterogeneous graph neural network abbreviated as TreeXGNN, which could efficiently and automatically extract target node features via gradient-boosted decision trees (GBDT). It integrates community structure information with proper fusion modules and a shared feature space design on HGNN. We achieved state-of-the-art performance on the three well-known heterogeneous graph benchmark datasets, IMDB, DBLP, and ACM, and significantly improved performance compared to previous studies. Our work paves the foundation for integrating tree-based models to boost HGNNs for general community analysis.