Node Masking: Making Graph Neural Networks Generalize and Scale Better

Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have received a lot of interest in the recent times. From the early spectral architectures that could only operate on undirected graphs per a transductive learning paradigm to the current state of the art spatial ones that can apply inductively to arbitrary graphs, GNNs have seen significant contributions from the research community. In this paper, we discuss some theoretical tools to better visualize the operations performed by state of the art spatial GNNs. We analyze the inner workings of these architectures and introduce a simple concept, node masking, that allows them to generalize and scale better. To empirically validate the theory, we perform several experiments on three widely-used benchmark datasets for node classification in both transductive and inductive settings.