Subsampling Graphs with GNN Performance Guarantees

Fuente: arXiv
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Autores principales: Jain, Mika Sarkin, Jegelka, Stefanie, Karmarkar, Ishani, Ruiz, Luana, Vitercik, Ellen
Formato: Preprint
Publicado: 2025
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author Jain, Mika Sarkin
Jegelka, Stefanie
Karmarkar, Ishani
Ruiz, Luana
Vitercik, Ellen
author_facet Jain, Mika Sarkin
Jegelka, Stefanie
Karmarkar, Ishani
Ruiz, Luana
Vitercik, Ellen
contents How can we subsample graph data so that a graph neural network (GNN) trained on the subsample achieves performance comparable to training on the full dataset? This question is of fundamental interest, as smaller datasets reduce labeling costs, storage requirements, and computational resources needed for training. Selecting an effective subset is challenging: a poorly chosen subsample can severely degrade model performance, and empirically testing multiple subsets for quality obviates the benefits of subsampling. Therefore, it is critical that subsampling comes with guarantees on model performance. In this work, we introduce new subsampling methods for graph datasets that leverage the Tree Mover's Distance to reduce both the number of graphs and the size of individual graphs. To our knowledge, our approach is the first that is supported by rigorous theoretical guarantees: we prove that training a GNN on the subsampled data results in a bounded increase in loss compared to training on the full dataset. Unlike existing methods, our approach is both model-agnostic, requiring minimal assumptions about the GNN architecture, and label-agnostic, eliminating the need to label the full training set. This enables subsampling early in the model development pipeline (before data annotation, model selection, and hyperparameter tuning) reducing costs and resources needed for storage, labeling, and training. We validate our theoretical results with experiments showing that our approach outperforms existing subsampling methods across multiple datasets.
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id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2502_16703
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Subsampling Graphs with GNN Performance Guarantees
Jain, Mika Sarkin
Jegelka, Stefanie
Karmarkar, Ishani
Ruiz, Luana
Vitercik, Ellen
Machine Learning
How can we subsample graph data so that a graph neural network (GNN) trained on the subsample achieves performance comparable to training on the full dataset? This question is of fundamental interest, as smaller datasets reduce labeling costs, storage requirements, and computational resources needed for training. Selecting an effective subset is challenging: a poorly chosen subsample can severely degrade model performance, and empirically testing multiple subsets for quality obviates the benefits of subsampling. Therefore, it is critical that subsampling comes with guarantees on model performance. In this work, we introduce new subsampling methods for graph datasets that leverage the Tree Mover's Distance to reduce both the number of graphs and the size of individual graphs. To our knowledge, our approach is the first that is supported by rigorous theoretical guarantees: we prove that training a GNN on the subsampled data results in a bounded increase in loss compared to training on the full dataset. Unlike existing methods, our approach is both model-agnostic, requiring minimal assumptions about the GNN architecture, and label-agnostic, eliminating the need to label the full training set. This enables subsampling early in the model development pipeline (before data annotation, model selection, and hyperparameter tuning) reducing costs and resources needed for storage, labeling, and training. We validate our theoretical results with experiments showing that our approach outperforms existing subsampling methods across multiple datasets.
title Subsampling Graphs with GNN Performance Guarantees
topic Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2502.16703