Motif-Matching Based Subgraph-Level Attentional Convolutional Network for Graph Classification

Graph classification is critically important to many real-world applications that are associated with graph data such as chemical drug analysis and social network mining. Traditional methods usually require feature engineering to extract the graph features that can help discriminate the graphs of different classes. Although recently deep learning based graph embedding approaches are proposed to automatically learn graph features, they mostly use a few vertex arrangements extracted from the graph for feature learning, which may lose some structural information. In this work, we present a novel motif-based attentional graph convolution neural network for graph classification, which can learn more discriminative and richer graph features. Specifically, a motif-matching guided subgraph normalization method is developed to better preserve the spatial information. A novel subgraph-level self-attention network is also proposed to capture the different impacts or weights of different subgraphs. Experimental results on both bioinformatics and social network datasets show that the proposed models significantly improve graph classification performance over both traditional graph kernel methods and recent deep learning approaches.