Causally-Aware Attribute Completion for Incomplete Federated Graph Clustering

Abstract

Node-level federated graph clustering allows multiple unlabeled subgraph holders to collaboratively train on node-level tasks without sharing private information. Existing methods usually assume that the node attributes are complete and have achieved promising progress. However, in the Federated Graph Learning (FGL) scenarios, this assumption is overly strict due to failures in data collection devices. Consequently, most existing FGL frameworks struggle to extract useful features from attribute-incomplete graphs for clustering, yet the issue remains underexplored. To bridge this gap, we propose a causally-aware attribute completion for Incomplete Federated Graph Clustering (IFedGC), which constructs a reliable global causal structure that incorporates clustering-friendly information to guide attribute completion for each subgraph. Specifically, in the attribute completion step, we first construct the causal structure to extract the causal relationships between initialized features, and then upload them to the server. Subsequently, we integrate multiple uploaded causal structures into a global causal one to achieve cross-client attribute completion. Moreover, to support reliable clustering, we first collect the high-confidence cluster centroids from each subgraph using a Graph Neural Network (GNN) model and subsequently aggregate these centroids on the server. The above two steps are seamlessly integrated into a unified FGL framework to obtain a clustering-oriented causal structure, which is sent back to the client to promote high-quality attribute completion for better clustering. Extensive results on five benchmark datasets demonstrate the effectiveness and superiority of IFedGC against its competitors.