Graph-Assisted Bayesian Node Classifiers

Abstract

Many datasets can be represented by attributed graphs on which classification methods may be of interest. The problem of node classification has attracted the attention of scholars due to its wide range of applications. The problem consists of predicting nodes’ labels based on their intrinsic features, features of their neighboring nodes and the graph structure. Graph Neural Networks (GNN) have been widely used to tackle this task. Thanks to the graph structure and the node features, they are able to propagate information over the graph and aggregate it to improve the classification performance. Their performance is however sensitive to the graph topology, especially its degree of impurity, a measure of the proportion of connected nodes belonging to different classes. Here, we propose a new Graph-Assisted Bayesian (GAB) classifier, which is designed for the problem of node classification. By using the Bayesian theorem, GAB takes into consideration the degree of impurity of the graph when classifying the nodes. We show that the proposed classifier is less sensitive to graph impurity, and less complex than GNN-based classifiers.

Keywords

• Node classification
• attributed graphs
• degree of impurity
• Bayesian framework