Unsupervised Hierarchical Graph Representation Learning by Mutual Information Maximization

03/18/2020

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by   Fei Ding, et al.

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Clemson University

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11

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Graph representation learning based on graph neural networks (GNNs) can greatly improve the performance of downstream tasks, such as node and graph classification. However, the general GNN models cannot aggregate node information in a hierarchical manner, and thus cannot effectively capture the structural features of graphs. In addition, most of the existing hierarchical graph representation learning are supervised, which are limited by the extreme cost of acquiring labeled data. To address these issues, we present an unsupervised graph representation learning method, Unsupervised Hierarchical Graph Representation UHGR, which can generate hierarchical representations of graphs. This contrastive learning technique focuses on maximizing mutual information between "local" and high-level "global" representations, which enables us to learn the node embeddings and graph embeddings without any labeled data. To demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method, we perform the node and graph classification using the learned node and graph embeddings. The results show that the proposed method achieves comparable results to state-of-the-art supervised methods on several benchmarks. In addition, our visualization of hierarchical representations indicates that our method can capture meaningful and interpretable clusters.