Structural Entropy Based Graph Structure Learning for Node Classification

Abstract

As one of the most common tasks in graph data analysis, node classification is frequently solved by using graph structure learning (GSL) techniques to optimize graph structures and learn suitable graph neural networks. Most of the existing GSL methods focus on fusing different structural features (basic views) extracted from the graph, but very little graph semantics, like hierarchical communities, has been incorporated. Thus, they might be insufficient when dealing with the graphs containing noises from real-world complex systems. To address this issue, we propose a novel and effective GSL framework for node classification based on the structural information theory. Specifically, we first prove that an encoding tree with the minimal structural entropy could contain sufficient information for node classification and eliminate redundant noise via the graph's hierarchical abstraction. Then, we provide an efficient algorithm for constructing the encoding tree to enhance the basic views. Combining the community influence deduced from the encoding tree and the prediction confidence of each view, we further fuse the enhanced views to generate the optimal structure. Finally, we conduct extensive experiments on a variety of datasets. The results demonstrate that our method outperforms the state-of-the-art competitors on effectiveness and robustness.