Title: EGO-CNN: AN EGO NETWORK-BASED REPRESENTA-TION OF GRAPHS DETECTING CRITICAL STRUCTURES Anonymous

Abstract: While existing graph embedding models can generate useful embedding vectors for graph-related tasks, what valuable information can be jointly learned from a graph embedding model is less discussed. In this paper, we consider the possibility of detecting critical structures by a graph embedding model. We propose Ego-CNN to embed graphs, which works in a local-to-global manner to take advantages of CNNs that gradually expands the detectable local regions on the graph as the network depth increases. Critical structures can be detected if Ego-CNN is combined with a supervised task model. We show that Ego-CNN is (1) competitive to state-of-the-art graph embeddings models, (2) can work nicely with CNNs visualization techniques to show the detected structures, and (3) is efficient and can incorporate with scale-free priors, which commonly occurs in social network datasets, to further improve the training efficiency.

1. INTRODUCTION:

A graph embedding algorithm converts graphs from structural representation to fixed-dimensional vectors. It is typically trained in a unsupervised manner for general learning tasks but recently, deep learning approaches such as Structure2vec (Dai et al. (2016) ) and Diffusion Convolution Neural Network (Atwood & Towsley (2016) ) are trained in a supervised manner and shown superior results against unsupervised approaches on many tasks such as node classification and graph classification.

While many algorithms perform well on graph-related tasks, what valuable information can be jointly learned from the graph embedding is less discussed. In this paper, we aim to develop a graph embedding model that jointly discovers the critical structures, i.e., partial graphs that are dominant to a learning task (e.g., graph classification) where the embedding is applied to. This helps people running the learning task to understand the reason behind the task results, and is particularly useful in certain domains such as the bioinformatics and social network analysis. For example, people in bioinformatics may wish to tell whether a protein is an enzyme or not and why. As shown in Figure 1 , if there is model that can backtrack the most critical parts, it may help people understand that it is the circular structures (the "holes") that distinguish enzyme from other substances. New knowledge may then be discovered by investigating the functionality of these holes.

Figure 1 : A model that detects critical structure (colored in black) for the graph classification task (enzymes classification in this case) can help people to understand why a protein is of a specified class or not.

Unfortunately, identifying critical structures is a challenging task. The first challenge is that critical structures are task-specific-the shape and location of critical structures may vary from task to task. This means that the graph embedding model needs to be learned together with the task model (e.g., , to identify if a methyl-nonane is symmetric or not, one must check the entire graph to know if the methyl is branched at the center position of the long carbon chain. In this task, the critical structure is the symmetric hydrocarbon at the two sides of the methyl branch, which can only be found at the global-scale. The second challenge is that finding out all matches of substructures in a graph is known as subgraph isomorphism and proven to be an NP-complete problem by Cook (1971) .

To the best of our knowledge, there is no existing graph embedding algorithm that can identify critical structures up to the global-scale in an efficient way. Most existing approaches has only limited ability in identifying critical structures. For example, Structure2vec (Dai et al. (2016) ) and Spectrum GCN (Defferrard et al. (2016) ) can only find critical structures of very simple shape. Patchy-San (Niepert et al. (2016) ) can only find critical structures within a small area around each node (i.e., at the local-scale). The only work that is able to identify critical structures at the globalscale is Spatial GCN (Bruna et al. (2013) ), but it has the complexity O(N 3 ), where N is the number of nodes, in both time and space, therefore is inefficient for large graphs.

In this paper, we propose the Ego-CNN that embeds a graph into distributed (multi-layer), fixeddimensional tensors. The Ego-CNN can be jointly learned with a supervised task model (e.g., fully-connected layers for graph classification) and help identify the task-specific critical structure at the global-scale. Some existing studies like DCNN (Atwood & Towsley (2016) ) and Patchy-San (Niepert et al. (2016) ) have borrowed the concept of CNN to embed graphs. The idea is to model the filters/kernels that scan through different parts of the graph (which we call the neighborhoods) to learn patterns most helpful to the learning task. Unlike images where a neighborhood can be clearly defined as the nearby pixels across channels, graphs have no standard notion of neighborhoods. Currently, the neighborhoods defined by above works have some limitations in that (1) a neighborhood does not represent a local region of the graph so the embedding model cannot take advantage of the location invariant patterns to speed up the learning process, or (2) a neighborhood represents a local region of the graph but cannot be recursively defined over the hidden layers, making the embedding model shallow and incapable of detecting critical structure at the global-scale. Different from most existing approaches, Ego-CNN defines a neighborhood at layer l as the (l + 1)-hop ego network centered at a specific node.1 This makes the Ego-CNN efficient since it learns the location invariant patterns. Also, a neighborhood at layer l enlarges the receptive field of the neighborhood centered at the same node at layer l -1. Ego-CNN can exploit the multi-layer architecture to detect the critical structure at the global-scale in the deeper layers. Furthermore, Ego-CNN works nicely with some common visualization techniques for CNNs (e.g., deconvolution proposed by Zeiler et al. (2011) ) and can output the critical structures behind each prediction made by the trained task model. Our contributions are

• We propose the Ego-CNN and show that an graph embedding based on ego networks can perform as well as (if not better than) existing approaches. We conduct experiments on many graph classification tasks and the results show that Ego-CNN can lead to the stateof-the-art performance. • By letting a neighborhood (an ego network) at a deeper layer share the same centering node with a neighborhood at the preceding layer (which we call the egocentric design), Ego-CNN supports a multi-layer architecture with enlarged receptive fields at deeper layers, thus can learn the critical structures at the global-scale. • Ego-CNN, which learns location invariant patterns recursively, is efficient. Each convolution takes only O(N kd) in both space and time for a filter to scan a graph with N nodes. We also show that Ego-CNN can readily incorporate the scale-free prior, which commonly exists in large (social) graphs, to further improve the training efficiency.

To the best of our knowledge, Ego-CNN is the first embedding model that can efficiently detect task-dependent critical structures at the global-scale. We hope it helps practitioners better explain the learning results and discover new knowledge in the future.

2. RELATED WORK:

We compare existing graph embedding models in Table 1 on the aspects of our goal, i.e. whether it jointly detects the global-scale critical structure and its computational complexity. Graph Kernels All graph kernels have a common drawback in that the embeddings are generated in a unsupervised manner, which means critical structure cannot be jointly detected at the generation of embeddings. Here we introduce three state-of-the-art graph kernels. The Weisfeiler-Lehman kernel (Shervashidze et al. (2011) ) grows the coverage of each node by collecting information from neighbors, which is conceptually similar to our method, but differs in that WL kernel collects only node labels, while our method collects the complete labeled neighborhood graphs from neighbors. Deep Graph Kernels (Yanardag & Vishwanathan (2015) ) and Subgraph2vec (Narayanan et al. (2016) ) were inspired by word2vec (Mikolov et al. (2013) ) models that embed structures by predicting neighbors' structures. Multiscale Laplacian Graph Kernels (Kondor & Pan (2016) ) can compare graphs at multiple scales by recursively comparing graphs based on the comparison of subgraphs. However, it's very inefficient in that comparing two graphs takes O(L|V | 5 ), where L represents the number of comparing scales.

Graphical Models Graph can also express the conditional dependence (edge) between random variables (node) in graphical models. models. Structure2vec (Dai et al. (2016) ) introduced a novel layer that makes the optimization procedures of approximation inference directly trainable by SGD. It's efficient on large graphs with time complexity linear to number of nodes. However, it's weak at identifying critical structures since approximation inference makes too much simplification on structures. For example, mean-field approximation assumes variables are independent of each other.

As a result, Structure2vec can only identify critical structures of very simple shape.

Convolution-based Methods Recently, many works are proposed by borrowing the concept of CNN to embed graphs. Figure 3 summarizes their definition of filters and neighborhoods. The Spatial Graph Convolutional Network (GCN) was proposed by Bruna et al. (2013) . The design of Spatial GCN (Figure 3 Therefore, the idea of Patchy-San cannot be readily extended to multiple layers.

To the best of our knowledge, the only work that scans on local neighborhoods and supports multiple layers is Neural Fingerprints (Duvenaud et al. (2015) ). But the neighborhood at layer l represents only the approximation (specially, the summation) of the l-hop neighbors. They use the approximation to avoid the vertex-ordering problem of adjacency matrix. However, at the same time, Neural Fingerprint loses the ability of detecting precise critical structures.

We know that CNN has two advantages: (1) detecting location invariant patterns and (2) overcoming the curse of dimensionality by multi-layer representations. To keep these advantages on graphs, we have to rethink the definition of neighborhood from scratch.

3. EGO-CNN:

The reason why the idea of Patchy-San fails to generalize into multiple layers is that its definition of neighborhood (which is based on adjacency matrix) makes the composition of neighborhoods at deeper layer not static and may not correspond to local regions in the graph. Our main idea is to use the egocentric design, i.e. the neighborhood is defined on the same node as all the preceeding layers. The overview of our method is depicted in Figure 4 . Given a graph G of N nodes, (1) Preprocess step: generate the neighborhood embeddings h (0) ∈ R N ×d and select the k nearest neighbors N br for all nodes For each node i, we select its k nearest neighbors N br(i), take its neighborhood as the subgraph formed by including node i itself and its k neighbors, and then embed this neighborhood to a ddim vector h (0) i ∈ R d . In general, any existing graph embedding models can be used to embed the neighborhood graphs, but we recommend to use Patchy-San since our Ego-CNN can be directly stacked on top of it.

(2) Ego-CNN: output embeddings of the enlarged neighborhoods

The Ego-CNN is composed of several Ego-Convolution layers. Our egocentric design is to define a neighborhood as its and its k neighbors' neighborhoods at previous layer, which results in a larger neighborhood centered on the same node. Figure 5 shows how this definition leads to the enlarged neighborhoods. Suppose neighborhoods are originally 1-hop ego networks. Consider the bold black node in Figure 5 , aggregating its neighbors' neighborhoods (centered in black nodes), its neighborhood is stretched out by 1-hop, becoming a 2-hop ego network. 

Specifically, we give the formal definition of our Ego-Convolution. A * B denotes:

(l) i ∈ R d l by h (l) ij = σ X (l) i * W (l) j + b (l) j , ∀j = 1, • • • , d l ,

Figure 5 : Our definition of neighborhoods is egocentric to a node (in bold black), which includes its(colored in black) and its neighbors' neighborhoods (centered in the black node).

where σ is the activation function,

X (l) i =       h (l-1) i h (l-1) n1 . . . h (l-1) n k       , n 1 , • • • , n k ∈ N br(i) are node i's neighbors and W (l) 1 , • • • , W (l)

d l ∈ R (k+1)×d l-1 are filters at l-th layer, and b

(l) 1 , • • • , b (l) d l ∈ R are bias terms. That is, X (l) i

is the concatenated matrix of its and its k neighbors' neighborhood embeddings at previous layer. The ordering of its neighbors n 1 • • • n k is determined using the neighborhood normalization proposed by Niepert et al. (2016) in the the preprocessing step, where the goal of using neighborhood normalization is to ensure two isomorphic neighborhoods to have the same concatenated matrix.

It is important to note that X (l) i keeps the precise structure of node i's neighborhood. As h

(l-1) n1 • • • h (l-1) n k

preserve its neighbors' neighborhood graphs, and the relative information about how its k neighbors' neighborhoods are connected is kept in h (l-1) i and in the ordering of k neighbors. Hence, by scanning through each X (l) i , the filters can capture precise neighborhood structures. By contrast, previous works such as GCN(Kipf & Welling (2017) ) and Neural Fingerprints (Duvenaud et al. (2015) ) fail to learn precise neighborhood structure as they generate node embeddings equivalently by

h (l) ij = σ A (l) i * W (l) j + b (l) j , where A (l) i = c 0 h (l-1) i + c 1 h (l-1) n1 + • • • + c k h (l-1) n k , W (l) j ∈ R d l-1 and c 0 , • • • , c k are constants.

Because the filters only learn the approximated neighborhood A (l) i (i.e. the summation of neighbors' node embeddings). The relative information of neighbors' neighborhoods is lost due to the summation.

(3) Task model: generate predictions Given graph embedding h (L) ∈ R N ×d L generated by Ego-CNN task models such as SVM or classification layers can be used to generate predictions for the learning task.

Effective Receptive Field on Ambient Graph A receptive field in Ego-CNN has the ambient coverage on graph that is effectively enlarged as network depth increases. Figure 6 shows the coverage of a node's receptive field across layers. Originally, this node's neighborhood is a 1-hop ego networks (Figure 6(a) ). The coverage of its corresponding receptive field is expanded into a 2-hop ego network (Figure 6(b) ) by passed through 1 Ego-Convolution. Note that it is not exactly its 2-hop ego network since edges across two neighbor's ego networks are not captured. As the depth of Ego-CNN increases, a receptive field at the l-th Ego-Convolution layer approximates covers a (l + 1)-hop ego network. As shown in Figure 6 (e), it's possible to cover the entire graph by a single receptive field.

The effectiveness of ambient coverage on graphs enables Ego-CNN to detect global-scale structures.

Besides, the effective coverage can be quite different for different receptive fields, which may reflect the positional information of the nodes. For example, the receptive field shown in Figure 6 (e) can cover the entire graph, while the one in Figure 6 (f) only covers a small part of the graph. This difference is related to the global position of these nodes. By comparing receptive fields, we think it is possible for Ego-CNN to be aware of the positional information of nodes and then take advantages of it.

4. ADVANTAGES OF EGO-CNN:



4.1. DETECTING CRITICAL STRUCTURES:

Given a trained Ego-CNN, there are many ways to visualize critical structures. Here we consider Ego-CNN is used with the general task model, which can be several neural network layers or can be an additional classifier such as SVM. Our approach takes in two steps.

1. Find out the most important neighborhoods. The simplest way is to add an Attention layer (Itti et al. (1998) ) to generate a score representing the importance of each neighborhood. To train the weights of the Attention layer, we fix weights of previous layers (i.e. Patchy-San and Ego-Convolution) and add a Dense layer to train for the task. We can pickup important neighborhoods by setting a threshold.

2.. Identify critical regions in those important neighborhoods.:

Since the critical parts is considered in the network's perspective, we take the approach similar to Deconvolution (Zeiler et al. ( 2011)). For simplicity, assume we use ReLU as the activation function. Given the node embedding of an important neighborhood (found by step 1) h

i ∈ R d l at the l-th layer, we can interpolate its receptive field (which contains its and its k neighbors' neighborhoods at previous layer) by

d l j=1 h (l) ij W (l) j =       h (l-1) i h (l-1) n1 . . . h (l-1) n k      

, where n 1 . . . n k ∈ N br(i). Note that the interpolated values belonging to the same position at the (l -1)-th layer are summed up, which is the same as Deconvolution on traditional CNNs. Then, for each of the interpolated neighborhoods, we iteratively repeat the Deconvolution to interpolate their neighborhoods at the preceding layer until reaching the Patchy-San layer getting many neighborhoods in the form of adjacency matrices. These adjacency matrix are critical structures to the task, and the edge weight in adjacency matrix corresponds to the importance of an edge. Scale-Free Regularizer Scale-free networks (Li et al. (2005) ) are networks with self-similarity, which means the same patterns can be observed when zooming at different scales. Specifically, scale-free networks can be determined by RS box-covering(Kim et al. ( 2007)) if it satisfies N B (l B ) ∼ l s B B , i.e. to cover the entire network by fixed-length boxes, the box length l B and the required number of boxes N B (l B ) follows a power-law. In practice, the power-law degree distribution is usually a common indicator for scale-free networks.

4.2. EFFICIENCY AND:

Figure 7 : The degree distribution of Reddit dataset follows a power-law in log-log plot.

Figure 7 shows the degree distribution of the Reddit dataset, where we use it to benchmark model performance on classification tasks. We found degree distribution of graphs in Reddit datasets follows a power-law. This motivates us to think of the possibility of introducing scale-free priors into Ego-CNN. Recall that filters of the l-th Ego-Convolution layer is detecting the combinations of how neighborhoods at the (l -1)-th layer are combined into neighborhoods at the l-th layer. Because of the self-similarity in the definition, one way to generate the scale-free network is to repeat the combination at each layer. This means we can simply introduce scale-free prior into the Ego-CNN by weight-tying, i.e. let the filters share across different Ego-Convolution layers.

5. EXPERIMENTS:

We perform a set of experiments to verify (i) the performance compared to existing graph embedding models on classification datasets, (ii) the effectiveness of scale-free regularizer, and (iii) visualization of identified critical structures. All experiments were performed on a computer with 48-core Intel(R) Xeon(R) E5-2690 CPU, 64 GB RAM, and NVidia Geforce GTX 1070 GPU. We use Tensorflow 1.0 to implement our methods.

5.1. GRAPH CLASSIFICATION:

We benchmark on both bioinformatic and social-network datasets, which are processed by Kersting et al. (2016) . Most graphs in bioinformatic datasets are labeled graphs that contain node and edge labels or attributes, while graphs are unlabeled (i.e. only structure of graph is given) in social network datasets. More details about these datasets can be found in DGK (Yanardag & Vishwanathan (2015) ). The average test accuracy of 10-fold CV is reported to compared with existing methods. The results is listed in Table 2 , where figures of most baselines are directly taken from their papers since experimental settings are the same. For simplicity, we use the same network architecture for all datasets. To embed neighborhood graphs, we choose Patchy-San since it deals with labeled graphs and works nicely with CNN visualization techniques. The architecture of network is composed of 1 Patchy-San layer (128 filter and k=10, which is the best setting for k reported in their paper), then follows our Ego-CNN with 5 Ego-Convolution layers (128 filters and k=16), and 2 Dense layers with 128 neurons as the task model. To normalize neighbors, we follow Patchy-San's approach to use 1-WL labels. We train the network by Adam with learning rate 0.0001 and use Dropout with droprate 0.5 and Batch Normalization for regularization. To introduce scale-free priors into network by weight-tying, we expand 1 Ego-Convolution layer to 5 Ego-Convolution layers with the same weight, so the total parameters is 1.3M, which is the same as network in 1st row but the advantage is that we improve the test accuracy by 3.5%. Also, in the 3rd row, we compare against the network with same architecture but without using the scale-free regularizer. The number of parameter is 1M more but does not give better performance. This shows that introducing scale-free priors improves the learning efficiency, so that the same (or even better) performance can be obtained by training with fewer parameters.

5.3. VISUALIZATION OF CRITICAL STRUCTURES:

As a sanity check, we generate two example compound datasets to visualize critical structures at the local-scale (Alkanes vs Alcohols) and global scale (Symmetric vs Asymmetric Isomers). The structures of compounds are generated of different size and under different vertex-orderings.

First, we'd like to know if the network considers OH-base as critical structures. The visualization result is shown in 8, where critical structures are plotted in grey color, and the node/edge size are proportional to its important score. We find that the OH-base in Alcohols is always consider critical no matter how long it its. From the visualization result (Figure 10 ), we observe that the detected structures seemed to be the "bridges" that interconnect highly active users who has many discussions with other users. If each active user represents an strong opinion in the thread, the visualization result suggests that the discussion of different opinions are the key to discriminant discussion-based threads from QA-based threads. 

6. CONCLUSIONS:

We propose Ego-CNN with idea of the egocentric design to define neighborhood on the same node across layers. The egocentric design enables Ego-CNN to fully take advantages of CNN to perform efficient learning on graphs, so that neighborhoods are enlarged as depth increases. Also, training efficiency can be increased by introducing scale-free priors, and visualization techniques for CNN can be used to visualize structures detected by Ego-CNN. We hope Ego-CNN helps people in domains such as bioinformatic, cheminformatics to understand their experiment results.

The future direction is to further reduce the space requirement of Ego-CNN. Since receptive fields at deeper Ego-Convolution layer represents larger neighborhoods, the overlapping area among neighborhoods of different nodes may also be enlarged. So, instead of using all neighborhoods, it might be enough to embed graphs by only part of the neighborhoods.

:

In a graph, an l-hop ego network centered at node i is a subgraph consisting of the node i and all its l-hop neighbors as well as the edges between these nodes.

A diffusion matrix D is of size h × N for a graph of N nodes and each element Dij represents if this node connects to node vj in i hops.

Figures and Tables:

Figure 2: (a) OH function group is the critical structure to tell Alcohols from Alkanes. (b) The symmetry hydrocarbon group (at two sides of the methyl branch) is the critical structure to discriminate between symmetric and asymmetric isomer of methylnonane.

Figure3: Filters and neighborhood in (a) Spatial GCN byBruna et al. (2013). The filter W is a sparse matrix, which is not aimed to scan for detecting local patterns, but to learn connectivity of clusters based on cluster features X. (b) DCNN by Atwood & Towsley (2016) that scans through the diffusion matrix of each node. (c) Patchy-San by Niepert et al. (2016) that scans adjacency matrix of local neighborhood of each node. (d) Neural Fingerprints by Duvenaud et al. (2015) that scans approximated neighborhood (specially, the summation of neighbors' embeddings) of each node. (e) Ego-Convolution scans egocentric designed neighborhoods of each node.

Figure 4: The model architecture of Ego-CNN. Our egocentric design defines neighborhood on the same node (dashed line indicates the neighborhoods centered at the same node). Neighborhoods are enlarged through Ego-Convolution by aggregating neighbors' neighborhoods.

ij B ij for two matrices A, B of the same size. The l-th Ego-Convolution layer generates node i's neighborhood embedding h

Figure 6: A receptive field of Ego-CNN effective enlarges the coverage on graph as depth increases. (a) Suppose input neighborhoods are 1-hop ego networks. (b)-(e) the effective coverage of receptive fields at the 1st to the 4-th Ego-Convolution layer, which are the neighborhoods (in grey) centered at the same node (colored in black) at different scales. (f) the coverage of receptive field of another node at the 4th layer only covers a small local region of graph. The different coverage on graph reflects the position of the center node.

THE SCALE-FREE PRIOR Computation Complexity Given a graph with N nodes. To generate neighborhood embeddings at the l-th Ego-Convolution. It takes O(N ) to lookup embeddings of k neighbors' neighborhoods and O(N k log k) to concat neighborhoods according to neighbors' global order, and O (N (k + 1)d l-1 d l ) to perform convolution through each receptive fields (of size (k +1)×d l-1 ) by d l filters. In total, for a Ego-CNN with L Ego-Convolution layers, it takes O N (k + 1)

Figure 8: Visualization of critical structures on Alkane vs Alcohol. The critical structures are colored in grey and the node/edge size is proportional to its importance. The OH-base in Alcohols is always considered critical.

(a) Discussion-based thread. (b) QA-based thread.

Figure 10: Visualization of critical structures on Reddit dataset. The critical structures are colored in grey and the node/edge size is proportional to its importance.

A comparison of graph embedding models. Let d be the embedding dimension, k be

Table content: <table/>

Since expressing graphs by adjacency matrices is not invariant under different vertex ordering, they proposed neighborhood normalization to generate similar adjacency matrices for isomorphic neighborhoods. Patchy-San can detect precise structures but it is inefficient to scan for large local neighborhood, which limits it from detecting global-scale critical structures. Also, the embedding model of Patchy-San is only a single layer, a question to ask is that is it possible to improve the efficiency by generalizing its definition of neighborhood into multiple layers? If the adjacency matrix of neighborhoods is generated (e.g. the similarity of all embedding vectors of all neighborhoods), the neighborhood at next layer can be defined as the k most similar neighborhoods. However, this naive generalization don't work for two reasons. First, the concept of local neighborhood is lost since two neighborhoods that have similar embedding vectors are not necessary to be adjacent on the graph. Second, the structure of neighborhood is dynamic since the k most similar neighborhoods changes during training. Thus, this generalization (based on adjacency matrix) does not give neighborhoods corresponding to local regions

Table content: <table/>

10-Fold CV test acc (%) on bioinfomatic(left) and social-network(right) datasets.Our Ego-CNN improves the performance of Patchy-San on most datasets since the fixed-size neighborhoods (each contains at most 10 neighbors) detected by Patchy-San are grown into larger neighborhoods by Ego-Convolution. It makes sense on datasets such as MUTAG, where the task is to predict if compounds are mutagenic to DNA. It is reported byDebnath et al. (1991) that compounds with more than 3 benzene rings are very likely to be positive. To detect benzene rings in compounds, it's easier for Ego-CNN since we detect much larger local neighborhoods. This shows that representing graphs by larger neighborhoods is helpful on these datasets.5.2 SCALE-FREE REGULARIZERSince we found most graphs in Reddit dataset are scale-free graphs, we verify the effectiveness of scale-free regularizer on it. The results are shown in Table3.

Table content: <table><tr><td>Dataset</td><td colspan="5">MUTAG PTC PROTEINS NCI1 DD</td><td/><td/><td/><td/><td/></tr><tr><td>Size</td><td>188</td><td>344</td><td>1113</td><td colspan="2">4110 1178</td><td/><td/><td/><td/><td/></tr><tr><td>Max # node</td><td>28</td><td>64</td><td>620</td><td>125</td><td>5748</td><td/><td/><td/><td/><td/></tr><tr><td># class</td><td>2</td><td>2</td><td>2</td><td>2</td><td>2</td><td/><td/><td/><td/><td/></tr><tr><td>WL kernel</td><td>82.1</td><td>57.0</td><td>73.6</td><td>82.2</td><td>78.0</td><td/><td/><td/><td/><td/></tr><tr><td>DGK</td><td>82.9</td><td>59.2</td><td>73.3</td><td>80.3</td><td/><td/><td/><td/><td/><td/></tr><tr><td>Subgraph2vec</td><td>87.2</td><td>60.1</td><td>73.4</td><td>80.3</td><td/><td>Dataset</td><td colspan="4">IMDB (B) IMDB (M) REDDIT (B) COLLAB</td></tr><tr><td>MLG</td><td>84.2</td><td>63.6</td><td>76.1</td><td>80.8</td><td/><td>Size</td><td>1000</td><td>1000</td><td>2000</td><td>5000</td></tr><tr><td>Structure2vec</td><td>88.3</td><td/><td/><td>83.7</td><td>82.2</td><td>Max # node # class</td><td>270 2</td><td>176 3</td><td>3782 2</td><td>982 3</td></tr><tr><td>DCNN</td><td>67.0</td><td>56.6</td><td/><td>62.6</td><td/><td>DGK</td><td>67.0</td><td>44.6</td><td>78.0</td><td>73.0</td></tr><tr><td>Patchy-San</td><td>92.6</td><td>60.0</td><td>75.9</td><td>78.6</td><td>78.1</td><td>Patchy-San Ego-CNN</td><td>71.0 72.3</td><td>45.2 48.1</td><td>86.3 87.8</td><td>72.6 74.2</td></tr><tr><td>Ego-CNN</td><td>93.1</td><td>63.8</td><td>73.8</td><td>80.7</td><td>75.6</td><td/><td/><td/><td/><td/></tr><tr><td colspan="3">Network architecture</td><td/><td colspan="6">Weight-tying? 10-Fold CV test acc (%) Total # of parameters</td><td/></tr><tr><td colspan="4">Patchy-San + 1 Ego-Convolution Patchy-San + 5 Ego-Convolution Patchy-San + 5 Ego-Convolution</td><td>!</td><td/><td>84.9 88.4 87.8</td><td/><td>1.3M 1.3M 2.3M</td><td/><td/></tr></table>

Ego-CNN with scale-free prior on Reddit dataset.

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Peer review (iclr2018):
 Dear authors, Thank you for your contribution to ICLR. The problem you are addressing with your work is important. Your paper is well-motivated. Detecting and exploiting "critical structures" in graphs for graph classification is indeed something that is missing in previous work. After the introduction you discuss some related work. While I really appreciate the effort you put into this section (including the figures etc.) there are several inaccuracies in the portrayal of existing methods. Especially the comparison to Patchy-san is somewhat vague. Please make sure that you clearly state the differences between patchy-san and Ego-CNNs. What exactly is it that Patchy cannot achieve that you can. I believe I understood what the advantages of the proposed method are but it took a while to get there. Just one example to show you what I mean; you write: "The reason why the idea of Patchy-San fails to generalize into multiple layers is that its definition of neighborhood, which is based on adjacency matrix, is not static and may not corresponding to local regions in the graph. " It is very difficult to understand what it is that you want to express with the above sentence. Its definition of neighborhood is based on adjacency matrix - what does that mean? A neighborhood is a set of nodes, no? Why is it that their definition of neighborhood might not correspond to local regions? In general, you should try to be more precise and concise when discussing related work. Section 3, the most important section in the paper that describes the proposed Ego-CNN approach, should also be written more clearly. For instance, it would be good if you could define the notion of an "Ego-Convolution layer." You use that term without properly defining it and it is difficult to make sense of the approach without understanding it. Also, you contrast your approach with patchy and write that "Our main idea is to use the egocentric design, i.e. the neighborhood at next layer is defined on the same node." Unfortunately, I find it difficult to understand what this means. In general, this section is very verbose and needs a lot more work. This is at the moment also the crucial shortcoming of the paper. You should spent more time on section 3 and formally and more didactically introduce your approach. In my opinion, without a substantial improvement of this section, the paper should not be accepted. The experiments are standard and compare to numerous existing state of the art methods. The data sets are also rather standard. The one thing I would add to the results are the standard deviations. It is common to report those. Also, in the learning for graph structured data, the variance can be quite high and providing the stddev would at least indicate how significant the improvements are. I also like the visualizations and the discussion of the critical structures found in some of the graphs. Overall, I think this is an interesting paper that has a lot of potential. The problem, however, is that the presentation of the proposed approach is verbose and partially incomprehensible. What exactly is different to existing approaches? What exactly is the formal definition of the method? All of this is not well presented and, in my opinion, requires another round of editing and reviews.