An Ensemble Learning Approach to Graph Learning Based on Evolutionary Graph Neural Architecture Search.

Abstract

The graph neural networks (GNNs) have been successfully applied to non-Euclidean graph data mining tasks, attracting widespread attention. At present, to achieve promising performance, many researchers use neural architecture search (NAS) on GNNs to enhance applicability and accuracy without requiring significant manual intervention or rich domain knowledge. However, most existing graph NAS (GNAS) algorithms struggle with high-dimensional data and often overlook the characteristics and distribution of different solutions within the search space, which may result in local optima and underutilization of the search potential. This article proposes Ensemble-GNAS, a novel framework that integrates evolutionary GNAS with ensemble learning to address these limitations. Within this framework, we develop two key strategies: an evolutionary GNAS method based on a niche strategy to enhance local search capability and the diversify candidate networks and an ensemble fusion strategy based on a tree-structured Parzen estimator (TPE) to optimize the weights of candidate networks in an ensemble model. The proposed approach is evaluated on: 1) node classification datasets, including citation networks for paper classification and cancer-specific gene interaction networks for driver gene identification and 2) link prediction and graph classification datasets. The experimental results indicate that the proposed approach outperforms the state-of-the-art methods in both classification accuracy and performance stability. Moreover, the ablation study verifies the contribution of the integrated niche and TPE strategies within the overall framework. The source code of Ensemble-GNAS can be obtained from https://github.com/WilfongGuo/EnsembleGNAS.