Wang, Yongyu
Boosting Graph Neural Network Training by Focusing on Non-Robust Samples from the Training Set
Wang, Yongyu
Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) are a highly effective neural network architecture for processing graph-structured data. Unlike traditional neural networks that rely solely on the features of the data as input, GNNs leverage both the graph structure, which represents the relationships between data points, and the feature matrix of the data to optimize their feature representation. This unique capability enables GNNs to achieve superior performance across various tasks. However, it also makes GNNs more susceptible to noise from both the graph structure and data features, which can significantly increase the training difficulty and degrade their performance. To address this issue, this paper proposes a novel method for selecting noise-sensitive training samples from the original training set to construct a smaller yet more effective training set for model training. These samples are then used to enhance the model's ability to handle noise-prone instances effectively. We have evaluated our approach on three of the most classical GNN models -- GCN, GAT, and GraphSAGE -- as well as three widely used benchmark datasets: Cora, Citeseer, and PubMed. Our experiments demonstrate that the proposed method can substantially boost the overall training of Graph Neural Networks compared to using randomly constructed training sets.
Improving Graph Neural Networks via Adversarial Robustness Evaluation
Wang, Yongyu
Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) are currently one of the most powerful types of neural network architectures. Their advantage lies in the ability to leverage both the graph topology, which represents the relationships between samples, and the features of the samples themselves. However, the given graph topology often contains noisy edges, and GNNs are vulnerable to noise in the graph structure. This issue remains unresolved. In this paper, we propose using adversarial robustness evaluation to select a small subset of robust nodes that are less affected by noise. We then only feed the features of these robust nodes, along with the KNN graph constructed from these nodes, into the GNN for classification. Additionally, we compute the centroids for each class. For the remaining non-robust nodes, we assign them to the class whose centroid is closest to them. Experimental results show that this method significantly improves the accuracy of GNNs.
Addressing Noise and Efficiency Issues in Graph-Based Machine Learning Models From the Perspective of Adversarial Attack
Wang, Yongyu
Given that no existing graph construction method can generate a perfect graph for a given dataset, graph-based algorithms are invariably affected by the plethora of redundant and erroneous edges present within the constructed graphs. In this paper, we propose treating these noisy edges as adversarial attack and use a spectral adversarial robustness evaluation method to diminish the impact of noisy edges on the performance of graph algorithms. Our method identifies those points that are less vulnerable to noisy edges and leverages only these robust points to perform graph-based algorithms. Our experiments with spectral clustering, one of the most representative and widely utilized graph algorithms, reveal that our methodology not only substantially elevates the precision of the algorithm but also greatly accelerates its computational efficiency by leveraging only a select number of robust data points.
Towards High-Performance Exploratory Data Analysis (EDA) Via Stable Equilibrium Point
Song, Yuxuan, Wang, Yongyu
Exploratory data analysis (EDA) is a vital procedure for data science projects. In this work, we introduce a stable equilibrium point (SEP) - based framework for improving the efficiency and solution quality of EDA. By exploiting the SEPs to be the representative points, our approach aims to generate high-quality clustering and data visualization for large-scale data sets. A very unique property of the proposed method is that the SEPs will directly encode the clustering properties of data sets. Compared with prior state-of-the-art clustering and data visualization methods, the proposed methods allow substantially improving computing efficiency and solution quality for large-scale data analysis tasks.
Accelerate Support Vector Clustering via Spectrum-Preserving Data Compression
Song, Yuxuan, Wang, Yongyu
This paper proposes a novel framework for accelerating support vector clustering. The proposed method first computes much smaller compressed data sets while preserving the key cluster properties of the original data sets based on a novel spectral data compression approach. Then, the resultant spectrally-compressed data sets are leveraged for the development of fast and high quality algorithm for support vector clustering. We conducted extensive experiments using real-world data sets and obtained very promising results. The proposed method allows us to achieve 100X and 115X speedups over the state of the art SVC method on the Pendigits and USPS data sets, respectively, while achieving even better clustering quality. To the best of our knowledge, this represents the first practical method for high-quality and fast SVC on large-scale real-world data sets
Improving Spectral Clustering Using Spectrum-Preserving Node Aggregation
Wang, Yongyu
Spectral clustering is one of the most popular clustering methods. However, the high computational cost due to the involved eigen-decomposition procedure can immediately hinder its applications in large-scale tasks. In this paper we use spectrum-preserving node reduction to accelerate eigen-decomposition and generate concise representations of data sets. Specifically, we create a small number of pseudonodes based on spectral similarity. Then, standard spectral clustering algorithm is performed on the smaller node set. Finally, each data point in the original data set is assigned to the cluster as its representative pseudo-node. The proposed framework run in nearly-linear time. Meanwhile, the clustering accuracy can be significantly improved by mining concise representations. The experimental results show dramatically improved clustering performance when compared with state-of-the-art methods.
GraphZoom: A multi-level spectral approach for accurate and scalable graph embedding
Deng, Chenhui, Zhao, Zhiqiang, Wang, Yongyu, Zhang, Zhiru, Feng, Zhuo
Graph embedding techniques have been increasingly deployed in a multitude of different applications that involve learning on non-Euclidean data. However, existing graph embedding models either fail to incorporate node attribute information during training or suffer from node attribute noise, which compromises the accuracy. Moreover, very few of them scale to large graphs due to their high computational complexity and memory usage. In this paper we propose GraphZoom, a multi-level framework for improving both accuracy and scalability of unsupervised graph embedding algorithms. GraphZoom first performs graph fusion to generate a new graph that effectively encodes the topology of the original graph and the node attribute information. This fused graph is then repeatedly coarsened into a much smaller graph by merging nodes with high spectral similarities. GraphZoom allows any existing embedding methods to be applied to the coarsened graph, before it progressively refine the embeddings obtained at the coarsest level to increasingly finer graphs. We have evaluated our approach on a number of popular graph datasets for both transductive and inductive tasks. Our experiments show that GraphZoom increases the classification accuracy and significantly reduces the run time compared to state-of-the-art unsupervised embedding methods.
Towards Scalable Spectral Clustering via Spectrum-Preserving Sparsification
Wang, Yongyu, Feng, Zhuo
The eigendeomposition of nearest-neighbor (NN) graph Laplacian matrices is the main computational bottleneck in spectral clustering. In this work, we introduce a highly-scalable, spectrum-preserving graph sparsification algorithm that enables to build ultra-sparse NN (u-NN) graphs with guaranteed preservation of the original graph spectrums, such as the first few eigenvectors of the original graph Laplacian. Our approach can immediately lead to scalable spectral clustering of large data networks without sacrificing solution quality. The proposed method starts from constructing low-stretch spanning trees (LSSTs) from the original graphs, which is followed by iteratively recovering small portions of "spectrally critical" off-tree edges to the LSSTs by leveraging a spectral off-tree embedding scheme. To determine the suitable amount of off-tree edges to be recovered to the LSSTs, an eigenvalue stability checking scheme is proposed, which enables to robustly preserve the first few Laplacian eigenvectors within the sparsified graph. Additionally, an incremental graph densification scheme is proposed for identifying extra edges that have been missing in the original NN graphs but can still play important roles in spectral clustering tasks. Our experimental results for a variety of well-known data sets show that the proposed method can dramatically reduce the complexity of NN graphs, leading to significant speedups in spectral clustering.