Improving Distinguishability of Class for Graph Neural Networks

Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have received widespread attention and applications due to their excellent performance in graph representation learning. Most existing GNNs can only aggregate 1-hop neighbors in a GNN layer, so they usually stack multiple GNN layers to obtain more information from larger neighborhoods. However, many studies have shown that model performance experiences a significant degradation with the increase of GNN layers. In this paper, we first introduce the concept of distinguishability of class to indirectly evaluate the learned node representations, and verify the positive correlation between distinguishability of class and model performance. Then, we propose a Graph Neural Network guided by Distinguishability of class (Disc-GNN) to monitor the representation learning, so as to learn better node representations and improve model performance. Specifically, we first perform inter-layer filtering and initial compensation based on Local Distinguishability of Class (LDC) in each layer, so that the learned node representations have the ability to distinguish different classes. Furthermore, we add a regularization term based on Global Distinguishability of Class (GDC) to achieve global optimization of model performance. Extensive experiments on six real-world datasets have shown that the competitive performance of Disc-GNN to the state-of-the-art methods on node classification and node clustering tasks.