Node-feature convolution for graph convolutional networks

Graph convolutional network (GCN) is an effective neural network model for graph representation learning. However, standard GCN suffers from three main limitations: (1) most real-world graphs have no regular connectivity and node degrees can range from one to hundreds or thousands, (2) neighboring nodes are aggregated with fixed weights, and (3) node features within a node feature vector are considered equally important. Several extensions have been proposed to tackle the limitations respectively. This paper focuses on tackling all the proposed limitations. Specifically, we propose a new node-feature convolutional (NFC) layer for GCN. The NFC layer first constructs a feature map using features selected and ordered from a fixed number of neighbors. It then performs a convolution operation on this feature map to learn the node representation. In this way, we can learn the usefulness of both individual nodes and individual features from a fixed-size neighborhood. Experiments on three benchmark datasets show that NFC-GCN consistently outperforms state-of-the-art methods in node classification.