LightCapsGNN: light capsule graph neural network for graph classification

Abstract

Graph neural networks (GNNs) have achieved excellent performances in many graph-related tasks. However, they need appropriate pooling operations to deal with the graph classification tasks, and thus, they may suffer from some limitations such as information loss and ignorance of the part-whole relationships. CapsGNN is proposed to solve the above-mentioned issues, but suffers from high time and space complexities leading to its poor scalability. In this paper, we propose a novel, effective and efficient graph capsule network called LightCapsGNN. First, we devise a fast voting mechanism (called LightVoting) implemented via linear combinations of K shared transformation matrices to reduce the number of trainable parameters in the voting procedure. Second, an improved reconstruction layer is proposed to encourage our model to capture more informative and essential knowledge of the input graph. Third, other improvements are combined to further accelerate our model, e.g., matrix capsules and a trainable routing mechanism. Finally, extensive experiments are conducted on the popular real-world graph benchmarks in the graph classification tasks and the proposed model can achieve competitive or even better performance compared to ten baselines or state-of-the-art models. Furthermore, compared to other CapsGNNs, the proposed model reduce almost \(99\%\) learnable parameters and \(31.1\%\) running time.