Continuous Graph Neural Networks
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This paper builds the connection between graph neural networks and traditional dynamical systems. Existing graph neural networks essentially define a discrete dynamic on node representations with multiple graph convolution layers. We propose continuous graph neural networks (CGNN), which generalise existing graph neural networks into the continuous-time dynamic setting. The key idea is how to characterise the continuous dynamics of node representations, i.e. the derivatives of node representations w.r.t. time. Inspired by existing diffusion-based methods on graphs (e.g. PageRank and epidemic models on social networks), we define the derivatives as a combination of the current node representations, the representations of neighbors, and the initial values of the nodes. We propose and analyse different possible dynamics on graphs—including each dimension of node representations (a.k.a. the feature channel) change independently or interact with each other—both with theoretical justification. The proposed continuous graph neural networks are robust to over-smoothing and hence capture the long-range dependencies between nodes. Experimental results on the task of node classification prove the effectiveness of our proposed approach over competitive baselines.
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