PKGCN: prior knowledge enhanced graph convolutional network for graph-based semi-supervised learning

Graph is a widely existed data structure in many real world scenarios, such as social networks, citation networks and knowledge graphs. Recently, Graph Convolutional Network (GCN) has been proposed as a powerful method for graph-based semi-supervised learning, which has the similar operation and structure as Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs). However, like many CNNs, it is often necessary to go through a lot of laborious experiments to determine the appropriate network structure and parameter settings. Fully exploiting and utilizing the prior knowledge that nearby nodes have the same labels in graph-based neural network is still a challenge. In this paper, we propose a model which utilizes the prior knowledge on graph to enhance GCN. To be specific, we decompose the objective function of semi-supervised learning on graphs into a supervised term and an unsupervised term. For the unsupervised term, we present the concept of local inconsistency and devise a loss term to describe the property in graphs. The supervised term captures the information from the labeled data while the proposed unsupervised term captures the relationships among both labeled data and unlabeled data. Combining supervised term and unsupervised term, our proposed model includes more intrinsic properties of graph-structured data and improves the GCN model with no increase in time complexity. Experiments on three node classification benchmarks show that our proposed model is superior to GCN and seven existing graph-based semi-supervised learning methods.