International Journal of Molecular Sciences (Jun 2024)

Composite Graph Neural Networks for Molecular Property Prediction

  • Pietro Bongini,
  • Niccolò Pancino,
  • Asma Bendjeddou,
  • Franco Scarselli,
  • Marco Maggini,
  • Monica Bianchini

DOI
https://doi.org/10.3390/ijms25126583
Journal volume & issue
Vol. 25, no. 12
p. 6583

Abstract

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Graph Neural Networks have proven to be very valuable models for the solution of a wide variety of problems on molecular graphs, as well as in many other research fields involving graph-structured data. Molecules are heterogeneous graphs composed of atoms of different species. Composite graph neural networks process heterogeneous graphs with multiple-state-updating networks, each one dedicated to a particular node type. This approach allows for the extraction of information from s graph more efficiently than standard graph neural networks that distinguish node types through a one-hot encoded type of vector. We carried out extensive experimentation on eight molecular graph datasets and on a large number of both classification and regression tasks. The results we obtained clearly show that composite graph neural networks are far more efficient in this setting than standard graph neural networks.

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