Feature-Attention Graph Convolutional Networks for Noise Resilient Learning

Noise and inconsistency commonly exist in real-world information networks, due to the inherent error-prone nature of human or user privacy concerns. To date, tremendous efforts have been made to advance feature learning from networks, including the most recent graph convolutional networks (GCNs) or attention GCN, by integrating node content and topology structures. However, all existing methods consider networks as error-free sources and treat feature content in each node as independent and equally important to model node relations. Noisy node content, combined with sparse features, provides essential challenges for existing methods to be used in real-world noisy networks. In this article, we propose feature-based attention GCN (FA-GCN), a feature-attention graph convolution learning framework, to handle networks with noisy and sparse node content. To tackle noise and sparse content in each node, FA-GCN first employs a long short-term memory (LSTM) network to learn dense representation for each node feature. To model interactions between neighboring nodes, a feature-attention mechanism is introduced to allow neighboring nodes to learn and vary feature importance, with respect to their connections. By using a spectral-based graph convolution aggregation process, each node is allowed to concentrate more on the most determining neighborhood features aligned with the corresponding learning task. Experiments and validations, w.r.t. different noise levels, demonstrate that FA-GCN achieves better performance than the state-of-the-art methods in both noise-free and noisy network environments.