Graph Summarization with Graph Neural Networks

TL;DR

This paper explores the use of various Graph Neural Network architectures for graph summarization, framing it as a subgraph classification problem, and compares their performance with non-neural methods on large web graphs.

Contribution

It formulates graph summarization as a subgraph classification task and adapts multiple GNN architectures, including non-message-passing models, to evaluate their effectiveness.

Findings

GNNs perform similarly across models.

GraphMLP often outperforms other GNNs.

Bloom filter surpasses neural methods in most cases.

Abstract

The goal of graph summarization is to represent large graphs in a structured and compact way. A graph summary based on equivalence classes preserves pre-defined features of a graph's vertex within a $k$-hop neighborhood such as the vertex labels and edge labels. Based on these neighborhood characteristics, the vertex is assigned to an equivalence class. The calculation of the assigned equivalence class must be a permutation invariant operation on the pre-defined features. This is achieved by sorting on the feature values, e. g., the edge labels, which is computationally expensive, and subsequently hashing the result. Graph Neural Networks (GNN) fulfill the permutation invariance requirement. We formulate the problem of graph summarization as a subgraph classification task on the root vertex of the $k$-hop neighborhood. We adapt different GNN architectures, both based on the popular message-passing protocol and alternative approaches, to perform the structural graph summarization task. We compare different GNNs with a standard multi-layer perceptron (MLP) and Bloom filter as non-neural method. For our experiments, we consider four popular graph summary models on a large web graph. This resembles challenging multi-class vertex classification tasks with the numbers of classes ranging from $576$ to multiple hundreds of thousands. Our results show that the performance of GNNs are close to each other. In three out of four experiments, the non-message-passing GraphMLP model outperforms the other GNNs. The performance of the standard MLP is extraordinary good, especially in the presence of many classes. Finally, the Bloom filter outperforms all neural architectures by a large margin, except for the dataset with the fewest number of $576$ classes.