Product Space Clustering with Graph Learning for Diversifying Industrial Production

During economic crises, diversifying industrial production emerges as a critical strategy to address societal challenges. The Product Space, a graph representing industrial knowledge proximity, acts as a valuable tool for recommending diversified product offerings. These recommendations rely on the edges of the graph to identify suitable products. They can be improved by grouping similar products together, which results in more precise suggestions. Unlike the topology, the textual data in nodes of the Product Space graph are typically unutilized in graph clustering methods. In this context, we propose a novel approach for economic graph learning that incorporates learning node data alongside network topology. By applying this method to the Product Space dataset, we demonstrate how recommendations have been improved by presenting real-life applications. Our research employing a graph neural network demonstrates superior performance compared to methods like Louvain and I-Louvain. Our contribution introduces a node data-based deep graph clustering graph neural network that significantly advances the macroeconomic literature and addresses the imperative of diversifying industrial production. We discuss both the advantages and limitations of deep graph learning models in economics, laying the groundwork for future research.