Graphs are complex objects that do not lend themselves easily to typical
learning tasks. Recently, a range of approaches based on graph kernels or graph
neural networks have been developed for graph classification and for
representation learning on graphs in general. As the developed methodologies
become more sophisticated, it is important to understand which components of
the increasingly complex methods are necessary or most effective.
As a first step, we develop a simple yet meaningful graph representation, and
explore its effectiveness in graph classification. We test our baseline
representation for the graph classification task on a range of graph datasets.
Interestingly, this simple representation achieves similar performance as the
state-of-the-art graph kernels and graph neural networks for non-attributed
graph classification. Its performance on classifying attributed graphs is
slightly weaker as it does not incorporate attributes. However, given its
simplicity and efficiency, we believe that it still serves as an effective
baseline for attributed graph classification. Our graph representation is
efficient (linear-time) to compute. We also provide a simple connection with
the graph neural networks.
Note that these observations are only for the task of graph classification
while existing methods are often designed for a broader scope including node
embedding and link prediction. The results are also likely biased due to the
limited amount of benchmark datasets available. Nevertheless, the good
performance of our simple baseline calls for the development of new, more
comprehensive benchmark datasets so as to better evaluate and analyze different
graph learning methods. Furthermore, given the computational efficiency of our
graph summary, we believe that it is a good candidate as a baseline method for
future graph classification (or even other graph learning) studies.Comment: 13 pages. Shorter version appears at 2019 ICLR Workshop:
Representation Learning on Graphs and Manifolds. arXiv admin note: text
overlap with arXiv:1810.00826 by other author