Constant Time Graph Neural Networks

• Published in: ACM transactions on knowledge discovery from data 2022-10, Vol.16 (5), p.1-31
• Main Authors: Sato, Ryoma, Yamada, Makoto, Kashima, Hisashi
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• ISSN: 1556-4681; 1556-472X
• DOI: 10.1145/3502733

The recent advancements in graph neural networks (GNNs) have led to state-of-the-art performances in various applications, including chemo-informatics, question-answering systems, and recommender systems. However, scaling up these methods to huge graphs, such as social networks and Web graphs, remains a challenge. In particular, the existing methods for accelerating GNNs either are not theoretically guaranteed in terms of the approximation error or incurred at least a linear time computation cost. In this study, we reveal the query complexity of the uniform node sampling scheme for Message Passing Neural Networks, including GraphSAGE, graph attention networks (GATs), and graph convolutional networks (GCNs). Surprisingly, our analysis reveals that the complexity of the node sampling method is completely independent of the number of the nodes, edges, and neighbors of the input and depends only on the error tolerance and confidence probability while providing a theoretical guarantee for the approximation error. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first article to provide a theoretical guarantee of approximation for GNNs within constant time. Through experiments with synthetic and real-world datasets, we investigated the speed and precision of the node sampling scheme and validated our theoretical results.