Fairness-Aware Graph Neural Networks: A Survey

Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have become increasingly important due to their representational power and state-of-the-art predictive performance on many fundamental learning tasks. Despite this success, GNNs suffer from fairness issues that arise as a result of the underlying graph data and the fundamental aggregation mechanism that lies at the heart of the large class of GNN models. In this article, we examine and categorize fairness techniques for improving the fairness of GNNs. Previous work on fair GNN models and techniques are discussed in terms of whether they focus on improving fairness during a preprocessing step, during training, or in a post-processing phase. Furthermore, we discuss how such techniques can be used together whenever appropriate, and highlight the advantages and intuition as well. We also introduce an intuitive taxonomy for fairness evaluation metrics including graph-level fairness, neighborhood-level fairness, embedding-level fairness, and prediction-level fairness metrics. In addition, graph datasets that are useful for benchmarking the fairness of GNN models are summarized succinctly. Finally, we highlight key open problems and challenges that remain to be addressed.

AutoGML: Fast Automatic Model Selection for Graph Machine Learning

Given a graph learning task, such as link prediction, on a new graph dataset, how can we automatically select the best method as well as its hyperparameters (collectively called a model)? Model selection for graph learning has been largely ad hoc. A typical approach has been to apply popular methods to new datasets, but this is often suboptimal. On the other hand, systematically comparing models on the new graph quickly becomes too costly, or even impractical. In this work, we develop the first meta-learning approach for automatic graph machine learning, called AutoGML, which capitalizes on the prior performances of a large body of existing methods on benchmark graph datasets, and carries over this prior experience to automatically select an effective model to use for the new graph, without any model training or evaluations. To capture the similarity across graphs from different domains, we introduce specialized meta-graph features that quantify the structural characteristics of a graph. Then we design a meta-graph that represents the relations among models and graphs, and develop a graph meta-learner operating on the meta-graph, which estimates the relevance of each model to different graphs. Through extensive experiments, we show that using AutoGML to select a method for the new graph significantly outperforms consistently applying popular methods as well as several existing meta-learners, while being extremely fast at test time.

CGC: Contrastive Graph Clustering for Community Detection and Tracking

Given entities and their interactions in the web data, which may have occurred at different time, how can we find communities of entities and track their evolution? In this paper, we approach this important task from graph clustering perspective. Recently, state-of-the-art clustering performance in various domains has been achieved by deep clustering methods. Especially, deep graph clustering (DGC) methods have successfully extended deep clustering to graph-structured data by learning node representations and cluster assignments in a joint optimization framework. Despite some differences in modeling choices (e.g., encoder architectures), existing DGC methods are mainly based on autoencoders and use the same clustering objective with relatively minor adaptations. Also, while many real-world graphs are dynamic, previous DGC methods considered only static graphs. In this work, we develop CGC, a novel end-to-end framework for graph clustering, which fundamentally differs from existing methods. CGC learns node embeddings and cluster assignments in a contrastive graph learning framework, where positive and negative samples are carefully selected in a multi-level scheme such that they reflect hierarchical community structures and network homophily. Also, we extend CGC for time-evolving data, where temporal graph clustering is performed in an incremental learning fashion, with the ability to detect change points. Extensive evaluation on real-world graphs demonstrates that the proposed CGC consistently outperforms existing methods.

EvoKG: Jointly Modeling Event Time and Network Structure for Reasoning over Temporal Knowledge Graphs

How can we perform knowledge reasoning over temporal knowledge graphs (TKGs)? TKGs represent facts about entities and their relations, where each fact is associated with a timestamp. Reasoning over TKGs, i.e., inferring new facts from time-evolving KGs, is crucial for many applications to provide intelligent services. However, despite the prevalence of real-world data that can be represented as TKGs, most methods focus on reasoning over static knowledge graphs, or cannot predict future events. In this paper, we present a problem formulation that unifies the two major problems that need to be addressed for an effective reasoning over TKGs, namely, modeling the event time and the evolving network structure. Our proposed method EvoKG jointly models both tasks in an effective framework, which captures the ever-changing structural and temporal dynamics in TKGs via recurrent event modeling, and models the interactions between entities based on the temporal neighborhood aggregation framework. Further, EvoKG achieves an accurate modeling of event time, using flexible and efficient mechanisms based on neural density estimation. Experiments show that EvoKG outperforms existing methods in terms of effectiveness (up to 77% and 116% more accurate time and link prediction) and efficiency.

Knowledge-Guided Dynamic Systems Modeling: A Case Study on Modeling River Water Quality

Modeling real-world phenomena is a focus of many science and engineering efforts, such as ecological modeling and financial forecasting, to name a few. Building an accurate model for complex and dynamic systems improves understanding of underlying processes and leads to resource efficiency. Towards this goal, knowledge-driven modeling builds a model based on human expertise, yet is often suboptimal. At the opposite extreme, data-driven modeling learns a model directly from data, requiring extensive data and potentially generating overfitting. We focus on an intermediate approach, model revision, in which prior knowledge and data are combined to achieve the best of both worlds. In this paper, we propose a genetic model revision framework based on tree-adjoining grammar (TAG) guided genetic programming (GP), using the TAG formalism and GP operators in an effective mechanism to incorporate prior knowledge and make data-driven revisions in a way that complies with prior knowledge. Our framework is designed to address the high computational cost of evolutionary modeling of complex systems. Via a case study on the challenging problem of river water quality modeling, we show that the framework efficiently learns an interpretable model, with higher modeling accuracy than existing methods.

J-Recs: Principled and Scalable Recommendation Justification

Online recommendation is an essential functionality across a variety of services, including e-commerce and video streaming, where items to buy, watch, or read are suggested to users. Justifying recommendations, i.e., explaining why a user might like the recommended item, has been shown to improve user satisfaction and persuasiveness of the recommendation. In this paper, we develop a method for generating post-hoc justifications that can be applied to the output of any recommendation algorithm. Existing post-hoc methods are often limited in providing diverse justifications, as they either use only one of many available types of input data, or rely on the predefined templates. We address these limitations of earlier approaches by developing J-Recs, a method for producing concise and diverse justifications. J-Recs is a recommendation model-agnostic method that generates diverse justifications based on various types of product and user data (e.g., purchase history and product attributes). The challenge of jointly processing multiple types of data is addressed by designing a principled graph-based approach for justification generation. In addition to theoretical analysis, we present an extensive evaluation on synthetic and real-world data. Our results show that J-Recs satisfies desirable properties of justifications, and efficiently produces effective justifications, matching user preferences up to 20% more accurately than baselines.

MultiImport: Inferring Node Importance in a Knowledge Graph from Multiple Input Signals

Given multiple input signals, how can we infer node importance in a knowledge graph (KG)? Node importance estimation is a crucial and challenging task that can benefit a lot of applications including recommendation, search, and query disambiguation. A key challenge towards this goal is how to effectively use input from different sources. On the one hand, a KG is a rich source of information, with multiple types of nodes and edges. On the other hand, there are external input signals, such as the number of votes or pageviews, which can directly tell us about the importance of entities in a KG. While several methods have been developed to tackle this problem, their use of these external signals has been limited as they are not designed to consider multiple signals simultaneously. In this paper, we develop an end-to-end model MultiImport, which infers latent node importance from multiple, potentially overlapping, input signals. MultiImport is a latent variable model that captures the relation between node importance and input signals, and effectively learns from multiple signals with potential conflicts. Also, MultiImport provides an effective estimator based on attentive graph neural networks. We ran experiments on real-world KGs to show that MultiImport handles several challenges involved with inferring node importance from multiple input signals, and consistently outperforms existing methods, achieving up to 23.7% higher NDCG@100 than the state-of-the-art method.

Dropout Prediction over Weeks in MOOCs by Learning Representations of Clicks and Videos

This paper addresses a key challenge in MOOC dropout prediction, namely to build meaningful representations from clickstream data. While a variety of feature extraction techniques have been explored extensively for such purposes, to our knowledge, no prior works have explored modeling of educational content (e.g. video) and their correlation with the learner's behavior (e.g. clickstream) in this context. We bridge this gap by devising a method to learn representation for videos and the correlation between videos and clicks. The results indicate that modeling videos and their correlation with clicks bring statistically significant improvements in predicting dropout.

Dropout Prediction over Weeks in MOOCs via Interpretable Multi-Layer Representation Learning

Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) have become popular platforms for online learning. While MOOCs enable students to study at their own pace, this flexibility makes it easy for students to drop out of class. In this paper, our goal is to predict if a learner is going to drop out within the next week, given clickstream data for the current week. To this end, we present a multi-layer representation learning solution based on branch and bound (BB) algorithm, which learns from low-level clickstreams in an unsupervised manner, produces interpretable results, and avoids manual feature engineering. In experiments on Coursera data, we show that our model learns a representation that allows a simple model to perform similarly well to more complex, task-specific models, and how the BB algorithm enables interpretable results. In our analysis of the observed limitations, we discuss promising future directions.

Estimating Node Importance in Knowledge Graphs Using Graph Neural Networks

How can we estimate the importance of nodes in a knowledge graph (KG)? A KG is a multi-relational graph that has proven valuable for many tasks including question answering and semantic search. In this paper, we present GENI, a method for tackling the problem of estimating node importance in KGs, which enables several downstream applications such as item recommendation and resource allocation. While a number of approaches have been developed to address this problem for general graphs, they do not fully utilize information available in KGs, or lack flexibility needed to model complex relationship between entities and their importance. To address these limitations, we explore supervised machine learning algorithms. In particular, building upon recent advancement of graph neural networks (GNNs), we develop GENI, a GNN-based method designed to deal with distinctive challenges involved with predicting node importance in KGs. Our method performs an aggregation of importance scores instead of aggregating node embeddings via predicate-aware attention mechanism and flexible centrality adjustment. In our evaluation of GENI and existing methods on predicting node importance in real-world KGs with different characteristics, GENI achieves 5-17% higher NDCG@100 than the state of the art.