Approximation of Personalized Propagation of Neural Predictions

Neural message-passing algorithms for semi-supervised classification on graphs have recently achieved great success. However, for classifying a node these methods only consider nodes that are a few propagation steps away and the size of this utilized neighbourhood is hard to extend. This paper uses the relationship between graph convolutional networks (GCN) and PageRank to derive an improved propagation scheme based on personalized PageRank. We utilize this propagation procedure to construct a simple model, personalized propagation of neural predictions (PPNP), and its fast approximation, APPNP. Our model's training time is on par or faster and its number of parameters is on par or lower than previous models. It leverages a large, adjustable neighbourhood for classification and can be easily combined with any neural network. We show that this model outperforms several recently proposed methods for semi-supervised classification in the most thorough study done so far for GCN-like models.