Understanding the Graph Convolutional Network Propogation Model

GCN Propagation Model

The GCN forward pass is presented as:

Where: – : number of nodes in graph
– : length of feature vector for each node
– : size of projection layer
– : n-by-n adjacency matrix
– : n-by-n adjacency matrix with added self-connections
– : n-by-n degree matrix of
– : n-by-c matrix of feature vectors for all nodes
– : c-by-f linear projection layer
– : non-linearity, such as ReLU

This becomes clear with an example. We create an undirected graph with 5 nodes:

import networkx as nx
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt

G = nx.Graph()

edges = [
    (1, 2), (1, 3), (1, 4), (1, 5), (2, 5)
    ]

G.add_edges_from(edges)

fig, ax = plt.subplots(1, 1, figsize=(4, 4), tight_layout=True)
pos = nx.spring_layout(G, seed=508)
nx.draw_networkx_nodes(G, pos, node_size=125, node_color="blue")
nx.draw_networkx_edges(G, pos, edgelist=edges, width=1, alpha=0.5, edge_color="black", style="solid")
nx.draw_networkx_labels(G, pos, font_size=9, font_color="white", font_weight="bold", font_family="sans-serif")
plt.axis("off")
plt.show();

The elements of the adjacency matrix indicate whether pairs of vertices are connected in the graph. For the graph shown above, the adjacency matrix is given by:

The first row indicates the nodes adjacent to node 1. Since node 1 is connected to all other nodes, all but the first cell are set to 1 (no self connections in ).

, where is the length-n identity matrix. This has the effect of adding self-connections to each node. We have:

After adding self-connections, the graph becomes:

G = nx.Graph()

edges = [
    (1, 2), (1, 3), (1, 4), (1, 5), (2, 5),
    (1, 1), (2, 2), (3, 3), (4, 4), (5, 5)
    ]

G.add_edges_from(edges)

fig, ax = plt.subplots(1, 1, figsize=(4, 4), tight_layout=True)
pos = nx.spring_layout(G, seed=508)
nx.draw_networkx_nodes(G, pos, node_size=125, node_color="blue")
nx.draw_networkx_edges(G, pos, edgelist=edges, width=1, alpha=0.5, edge_color="black", style="solid")
nx.draw_networkx_labels(G, pos, font_size=9, font_color="white", font_weight="bold", font_family="sans-serif")
plt.axis("off")
plt.show()

is a diagonal matrix, containing the row-wise sum of for each entry:

To get to , each element of is divided by for entries in . This normalization ensures the largest eigenvalue = 1, and addresses the issue of exploding/vanishing gradients during training:

Note that during training, is only computed once since the values will not change.

Each node has an associated feature vector of length . represents stacked feature vectors for all nodes, resulting in a matrix of dimension n-by-c.  , the original features.

is the linear projection layer, which reduces the representation of each node from length c to length f. If we assume f = 64, becomes:

For a 2-layer GCN, the full propagation model for a node classification task is:

Derivation of Propagation Model

The authors begin with an expression to perform spectral convolutions on graphs:

where is the matrix of eigenvectors of the normalized Laplacian , and represents the graph Fourier transform of . However, this as expensive operation, since the spectral decomposition is in practice. In addition, it isn’t immediately clear how one would go about incorporating this operation within the context of forward/back-propagation.

Citing a paper by Hammond et. al, they propose an approximation to via a truncated expansion in terms of Chebyshev polynomials up to order:

where and is a vector of Chebyshev coefficients. Note that for the Chebyshev polynomial expansion, , and all other terms are recursively defined as .

By leveraging to approximate graph convolutions, the runtime complexity becomes linear in terms of the number of edges ( instead of cubic in the number of nodes as is the case for the full spectral graph convolution.

From this point, the authors make three simplifications/assumptions which result in the propagation model introduced earlier:

The first two simplifications are and . Expanding with and results in:

The third simplification sets . This constrains the number of parameters to address overfitting and to minimize the number of multiplications per layer. Doing so results in:

To address the issue of exploding/vanishing gradients during training they apply a renormalization trick, essentially swapping and with and . This ensures eigenvalues are the the range [-1, 1]. We can show this is the case for our example using the adjacency matrix associated with our 5 node graph:

import numpy as np
import networkx as nx

np.set_printoptions(suppress=True, precision=5)


G = nx.Graph()
edges = [(1, 2), (1, 3), (1, 4), (1, 5), (2, 5)]

G.add_edges_from(edges)
A = nx.adjacency_matrix(G).todense()
I = np.identity(5)
D = np.diag(np.sum(A, axis=1))

# Check range of eigenvalues without renormalization.
Dp = np.linalg.inv(np.power(D, .5))
evals0, _ = np.linalg.eig(I + Dp @ A @ Dp)

# Check range of eigenvalues after renormalization trick. 
Atilde = A + I
Dtilde = np.diag(np.sum(Atilde, axis=1))
Dtildep = np.linalg.inv(np.power(Dtilde, .5))
evals1, _ = np.linalg.eig(Dtildep @ Atilde @ Dtildep)

print(f"\neigenvalues without renormalization: {evals0}")
print(f"eigenvalues with renormalization   : {evals1}")

eigenvalues without renormalization: [0.19098 2.      1.30902 0.5     1.     ]
eigenvalues with renormalization   : [-0.22526  1.       0.59192  0.5      0.     ]

By replacing with , we end up with:

where is a c-by-f matrix of filter parameters and is the n-by-f convolved signal matrix.
The final propagation model has nothing to do with the spectral decomposition: No eigenvectors/eigenvalues are actually computed. The approach was motivated by spectral convolutions on graphs, but is not a spectral method itself.

import random

import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
import networkx as nx
import numpy as np
import pandas as pd

import torch
from torch_geometric.datasets import Planetoid
import torch_geometric.transforms as T
from torch_geometric.utils import to_networkx

device = torch.device("cuda:0" if torch.cuda.is_available() else "cpu")
dataset = Planetoid(root='/tmp/Cora', name='Cora')
split = T.RandomNodeSplit(num_val=0.15, num_test=0.10)
graph = split(dataset[0])

dclasses = {
    0: "Theory",
    1: "Reinforcement_Learning", 
    2: "Genetic_Algorithms",
    3: "Neural_Networks",
    4: "Probabilistic_Methods",
    5: "Case_Based",
    6: "Rule_Learning"
    }

df = (
    pd.DataFrame(graph.y.tolist()) 
    .groupby(0, as_index=False).size()
    .rename({0: "id", "size": "n"}, axis=1)
    )

df["desc"] = df["id"].map(dclasses)
df["prop"] = df["n"] / df["n"].sum()
df[["id", "desc", "n", "prop"]].head(7)

import torch.nn as nn
from torch_geometric.nn import GCNConv
import torch.nn.functional as F


class GCN(nn.Module):
    def __init__(self, num_features, num_classes):
        super().__init__()
        self.conv1 = GCNConv(num_features, 64)
        self.conv2 = GCNConv(64, num_classes)

    def forward(self, data):
        x, edge_index = data.x, data.edge_index
        x = self.conv1(x, edge_index)
        x = F.relu(x)
        output = self.conv2(x, edge_index)
        return(output)


def train_classifier(model, graph, optimizer, criterion, n_epochs=100):
    """
    Training loop.
    """
    tm, vm = graph.train_mask, graph.val_mask
    for epoch in range(n_epochs):
        model.train()
        optimizer.zero_grad()
        output = model(graph)
        loss = criterion(output[tm], graph.y[tm])
        loss.backward()
        optimizer.step()

        # Validate. 
        model.eval()
        pred = model(graph).argmax(dim=1)
        correct = (pred[vm] == graph.y[vm]).sum()
        acc = correct / vm.sum()

        if epoch % 10 == 0:
            print(f"Epoch {epoch}: train loss={loss:.3f}, val. acc={acc:.3f}.")

    return(model)

# Capture activations from last hidden layer to re-create plot
# from paper.
activations = {}
def get_activation(name):
    def hook(gcn, input, output):
        activations[name] = output.detach()
    return(hook)

# Put graph on GPU if available.
graph = graph.to(device)
gcn = GCN(num_features=1433, num_classes=7).to(device)
gcn.conv2.register_forward_hook(get_activation("conv2"))
optimizer = torch.optim.Adam(gcn.parameters(), lr=0.01, weight_decay=1e-4)
criterion = nn.CrossEntropyLoss()
gcn = train_classifier(gcn, graph, optimizer, criterion)

# Compute test accuracy.
gcn.eval()
pred = gcn(graph).argmax(dim=1)
correct = (pred[graph.test_mask] == graph.y[graph.test_mask]).sum()
test_acc = correct / graph.test_mask.sum()
print(f"\nTest accuracy: {test_acc:.3f}\n")

Epoch 0: train loss=1.932, val. acc=0.303.
Epoch 10: train loss=0.377, val. acc=0.862.
Epoch 20: train loss=0.181, val. acc=0.867.
Epoch 30: train loss=0.119, val. acc=0.857.
Epoch 40: train loss=0.088, val. acc=0.852.
Epoch 50: train loss=0.069, val. acc=0.845.
Epoch 60: train loss=0.058, val. acc=0.847.
Epoch 70: train loss=0.050, val. acc=0.850.
Epoch 80: train loss=0.044, val. acc=0.855.
Epoch 90: train loss=0.040, val. acc=0.855.

Test accuracy: 0.893

from sklearn.manifold import TSNE

X = activations["conv2"].cpu().numpy()
Xemb = TSNE(n_components=2, learning_rate='auto', init='random', perplexity=30).fit_transform(X)
print(f"Xemb.shape: {Xemb.shape}")

fig, ax = plt.subplots(1, 1, tight_layout=True)
ax.scatter(Xemb[:,0], Xemb[:,1], c=pred.cpu(), alpha=.75)
ax.axis("off")
plt.show();

Xemb.shape: (2708, 2)