A Manifold Perspective on the Statistical Generalization of Graph Neural Networks

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Wang, Zhiyang, Cervino, Juan, Ribeiro, Alejandro
Format: Preprint
Published: 2024
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author Wang, Zhiyang
Cervino, Juan
Ribeiro, Alejandro
author_facet Wang, Zhiyang
Cervino, Juan
Ribeiro, Alejandro
contents Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) extend convolutional neural networks to operate on graphs. Despite their impressive performances in various graph learning tasks, the theoretical understanding of their generalization capability is still lacking. Previous GNN generalization bounds ignore the underlying graph structures, often leading to bounds that increase with the number of nodes -- a behavior contrary to the one experienced in practice. In this paper, we take a manifold perspective to establish the statistical generalization theory of GNNs on graphs sampled from a manifold in the spectral domain. As demonstrated empirically, we prove that the generalization bounds of GNNs decrease linearly with the size of the graphs in the logarithmic scale, and increase linearly with the spectral continuity constants of the filter functions. Notably, our theory explains both node-level and graph-level tasks. Our result has two implications: i) guaranteeing the generalization of GNNs to unseen data over manifolds; ii) providing insights into the practical design of GNNs, i.e., restrictions on the discriminability of GNNs are necessary to obtain a better generalization performance. We demonstrate our generalization bounds of GNNs using synthetic and multiple real-world datasets.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2406_05225
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle A Manifold Perspective on the Statistical Generalization of Graph Neural Networks
Wang, Zhiyang
Cervino, Juan
Ribeiro, Alejandro
Machine Learning
Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) extend convolutional neural networks to operate on graphs. Despite their impressive performances in various graph learning tasks, the theoretical understanding of their generalization capability is still lacking. Previous GNN generalization bounds ignore the underlying graph structures, often leading to bounds that increase with the number of nodes -- a behavior contrary to the one experienced in practice. In this paper, we take a manifold perspective to establish the statistical generalization theory of GNNs on graphs sampled from a manifold in the spectral domain. As demonstrated empirically, we prove that the generalization bounds of GNNs decrease linearly with the size of the graphs in the logarithmic scale, and increase linearly with the spectral continuity constants of the filter functions. Notably, our theory explains both node-level and graph-level tasks. Our result has two implications: i) guaranteeing the generalization of GNNs to unseen data over manifolds; ii) providing insights into the practical design of GNNs, i.e., restrictions on the discriminability of GNNs are necessary to obtain a better generalization performance. We demonstrate our generalization bounds of GNNs using synthetic and multiple real-world datasets.
title A Manifold Perspective on the Statistical Generalization of Graph Neural Networks
topic Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2406.05225