GIER: Addressing Class Imbalance in GNNs Through Experience Replay

Abstract

The prevalent class imbalance in real-world graphs significantly affects the performance of Graph Neural Networks (GNNs). Existing methods for analyzing graph imbalance ignore the influence of minority nodes during the dynamic model training process, resulting in performance limitations. In this paper, we focus on minority class information during model training, identifying and defining the minority class forgetting phenomenon that exists in graph imbalanced method training processes. To address this issue, we propose Graph Imbalance Experience Replay(GIER) framework. On one hand, the method enhances the model's ability to mine minority node information in historical data, thereby achieving feature completion for minority class nodes. On the other hand, the proposed short-term confidence mechanism allows the model to adaptively calibrate the topological relationships in high-confidence nodes, thereby mitigating the model's tendency to propagate erroneous information about minority classes during training. GIER is a unified framework consisting of two synergistic components: Long-term Subgraph Memory (LSM) constructs multi-period feature-representative subgraphs to address distribution imbalance, and Short-term Confidence Calibration (SCC) dynamically reconstructs graph topology through degree-aware node selection and confidence-based filtering to address topological imbalance. The extensive experimental results demonstrate that GIER effectively improves the classification performance of GNNs on imbalanced graphs, achieving up to a 3.44% improvement in BAcc over the state-of-the-art, and is particularly effective in extreme scenarios with very small minority classes.