Hierarchical graph sampling based minibatch learning with chain preservation and variance reduction

Graph sampling based Graph Convolutional Networks (GCNs) decouple the sampling from the forward and backward propagation during minibatch training, which exhibit good scalability in terms of layer depth and graph size. We propose HIS_GCNs, a hierarchical importance graph sampling based learning method. By constructing minibatches using sampled subgraphs, HIS_GCNs gives attention to the importance of both core and periphery nodes/edges in a scale-free training graph. Specifically, it preserves the centrum of the core to most minibatches, which maintains connectivity between periphery nodes, and samples periphery edges without core node interference, in order to keep more long chains composed entirely of low-degree nodes in the same minibatch. HIS_GCNs can maximize the discrete Ricci curvature (i.e., Ollivier-Ricci curvatures) of the edges in a subgraph that enables the preservation of important chains for information propagation, and can achieve a low node embedding variance and a high convergence speed. Diverse experiments on Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) with node classification tasks confirm superior performance of HIS_GCNs in both accuracy and training time. Open sourced code (https://github.com/HuQiaCHN/HIS-GCN).