Book Image

Hands-On Graph Neural Networks Using Python

By : Maxime Labonne
Book Image

Hands-On Graph Neural Networks Using Python

By: Maxime Labonne

Overview of this book

Graph neural networks are a highly effective tool for analyzing data that can be represented as a graph, such as networks, chemical compounds, or transportation networks. The past few years have seen an explosion in the use of graph neural networks, with their application ranging from natural language processing and computer vision to recommendation systems and drug discovery. Hands-On Graph Neural Networks Using Python begins with the fundamentals of graph theory and shows you how to create graph datasets from tabular data. As you advance, you’ll explore major graph neural network architectures and learn essential concepts such as graph convolution, self-attention, link prediction, and heterogeneous graphs. Finally, the book proposes applications to solve real-life problems, enabling you to build a professional portfolio. The code is readily available online and can be easily adapted to other datasets and apps. By the end of this book, you’ll have learned to create graph datasets, implement graph neural networks using Python and PyTorch Geometric, and apply them to solve real-world problems, along with building and training graph neural network models for node and graph classification, link prediction, and much more.
Table of Contents (25 chapters)
1
Part 1: Introduction to Graph Learning
5
Part 2: Fundamentals
10
Part 3: Advanced Techniques
18
Part 4: Applications
22
Chapter 18: Unlocking the Potential of Graph Neural Networks for Real-World Applications

Introducing Graph Convolutional Networks

The Graph Convolutional Network (GCN) architecture is the blueprint of what a GNN looks like. Introduced by Kipf and Welling in 2017 [1], it is based on the idea of creating an efficient variant of Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) applied to graphs. More accurately, it is an approximation of a graph convolution operation in graph signal processing. Thanks to its versatility and ease of use, the GCN has become the most popular GNN in scientific literature. More generally, it is the architecture of choice to create a solid baseline when dealing with graph data.

In this chapter, we’ll talk about the limitations of our previous vanilla GNN layer. This will help us to understand the motivation behind GCNs. We’ll detail how the GCN layer works and why it performs better than our solution. We’ll test this statement by implementing a GCN on the Cora and Facebook Page-Page datasets using PyTorch Geometric. This should improve...