Characterizing Graph Datasets for Node Classification: Homophily-Heterophily Dichotomy and Beyond

Fuente: arXiv
Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Platonov, Oleg, Kuznedelev, Denis, Babenko, Artem, Prokhorenkova, Liudmila
Format: Preprint
Published: 2022
Subjects:
Online Access:
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
_version_ 1866929314341060608
author Platonov, Oleg
Kuznedelev, Denis
Babenko, Artem
Prokhorenkova, Liudmila
author_facet Platonov, Oleg
Kuznedelev, Denis
Babenko, Artem
Prokhorenkova, Liudmila
contents Homophily is a graph property describing the tendency of edges to connect similar nodes; the opposite is called heterophily. It is often believed that heterophilous graphs are challenging for standard message-passing graph neural networks (GNNs), and much effort has been put into developing efficient methods for this setting. However, there is no universally agreed-upon measure of homophily in the literature. In this work, we show that commonly used homophily measures have critical drawbacks preventing the comparison of homophily levels across different datasets. For this, we formalize desirable properties for a proper homophily measure and verify which measures satisfy which properties. In particular, we show that a measure that we call adjusted homophily satisfies more desirable properties than other popular homophily measures while being rarely used in graph machine learning literature. Then, we go beyond the homophily-heterophily dichotomy and propose a new characteristic that allows one to further distinguish different sorts of heterophily. The proposed label informativeness (LI) characterizes how much information a neighbor's label provides about a node's label. We prove that this measure satisfies important desirable properties. We also observe empirically that LI better agrees with GNN performance compared to homophily measures, which confirms that it is a useful characteristic of the graph structure.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2209_06177
institution arXiv
publishDate 2022
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Characterizing Graph Datasets for Node Classification: Homophily-Heterophily Dichotomy and Beyond
Platonov, Oleg
Kuznedelev, Denis
Babenko, Artem
Prokhorenkova, Liudmila
Social and Information Networks
Discrete Mathematics
Machine Learning
Probability
Homophily is a graph property describing the tendency of edges to connect similar nodes; the opposite is called heterophily. It is often believed that heterophilous graphs are challenging for standard message-passing graph neural networks (GNNs), and much effort has been put into developing efficient methods for this setting. However, there is no universally agreed-upon measure of homophily in the literature. In this work, we show that commonly used homophily measures have critical drawbacks preventing the comparison of homophily levels across different datasets. For this, we formalize desirable properties for a proper homophily measure and verify which measures satisfy which properties. In particular, we show that a measure that we call adjusted homophily satisfies more desirable properties than other popular homophily measures while being rarely used in graph machine learning literature. Then, we go beyond the homophily-heterophily dichotomy and propose a new characteristic that allows one to further distinguish different sorts of heterophily. The proposed label informativeness (LI) characterizes how much information a neighbor's label provides about a node's label. We prove that this measure satisfies important desirable properties. We also observe empirically that LI better agrees with GNN performance compared to homophily measures, which confirms that it is a useful characteristic of the graph structure.
title Characterizing Graph Datasets for Node Classification: Homophily-Heterophily Dichotomy and Beyond
topic Social and Information Networks
Discrete Mathematics
Machine Learning
Probability
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2209.06177