Revisiting Graph Homophily Measures

Fuente: arXiv
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Autores principales: Mironov, Mikhail, Prokhorenkova, Liudmila
Formato: Preprint
Publicado: 2024
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author Mironov, Mikhail
Prokhorenkova, Liudmila
author_facet Mironov, Mikhail
Prokhorenkova, Liudmila
contents Homophily is a graph property describing the tendency of edges to connect similar nodes. There are several measures used for assessing homophily but all are known to have certain drawbacks: in particular, they cannot be reliably used for comparing datasets with varying numbers of classes and class size balance. To show this, previous works on graph homophily suggested several properties desirable for a good homophily measure, also noting that no existing homophily measure has all these properties. Our paper addresses this issue by introducing a new homophily measure - unbiased homophily - that has all the desirable properties and thus can be reliably used across datasets with different label distributions. The proposed measure is suitable for undirected (and possibly weighted) graphs. We show both theoretically and via empirical examples that the existing homophily measures have serious drawbacks while unbiased homophily has a desirable behavior for the considered scenarios. Finally, when it comes to directed graphs, we prove that some desirable properties contradict each other and thus a measure satisfying all of them cannot exist.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2412_09663
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Revisiting Graph Homophily Measures
Mironov, Mikhail
Prokhorenkova, Liudmila
Machine Learning
Discrete Mathematics
Social and Information Networks
Homophily is a graph property describing the tendency of edges to connect similar nodes. There are several measures used for assessing homophily but all are known to have certain drawbacks: in particular, they cannot be reliably used for comparing datasets with varying numbers of classes and class size balance. To show this, previous works on graph homophily suggested several properties desirable for a good homophily measure, also noting that no existing homophily measure has all these properties. Our paper addresses this issue by introducing a new homophily measure - unbiased homophily - that has all the desirable properties and thus can be reliably used across datasets with different label distributions. The proposed measure is suitable for undirected (and possibly weighted) graphs. We show both theoretically and via empirical examples that the existing homophily measures have serious drawbacks while unbiased homophily has a desirable behavior for the considered scenarios. Finally, when it comes to directed graphs, we prove that some desirable properties contradict each other and thus a measure satisfying all of them cannot exist.
title Revisiting Graph Homophily Measures
topic Machine Learning
Discrete Mathematics
Social and Information Networks
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2412.09663