Location-aware convolutional neural networks for graph classification

Graph patterns play a critical role in various graph classification tasks, e.g., chemical patterns often determine the properties of molecular graphs. Researchers devote themselves to adapting Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) to graph classification due to their powerful capability in pattern learning. The varying numbers of neighbor nodes and the lack of canonical order of nodes on graphs pose challenges in constructing receptive fields for CNNs. Existing methods generally follow a heuristic ranking-based framework, which constructs receptive fields by selecting a fixed number of nodes and dropping the others according to predetermined rules. However, such methods may lose important structure information through dropping nodes, and they also cannot learn task-oriented graph patterns. In this paper, we propose a Location learning-based Convolutional Neural Networks (LCNN) for graph classification. LCNN constructs receptive fields by learning the location of each node according to its embedding that contains structures and features information, then standard CNNs are applied to capture graph patterns. Such a location learning mechanism not only retains the information of all nodes, but also provides the ability for task-oriented pattern learning. Experimental results show the effectiveness of the proposed LCNN, and visualization results further illustrate the valid pattern learning ability of our method for graph classification. (c) 2022 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.