Learning on Random Balls is Sufficient for Estimating (Some) Graph Parameters

Takanori Maehara, Hoang NT

Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 34 (NeurIPS 2021)

Theoretical analyses for graph learning methods often assume a complete observation of the input graph. Such an assumption might not be useful for handling any-size graphs due to the scalability issues in practice. In this work, we develop a theoretical framework for graph classification problems in the partial observation setting (i.e., subgraph samplings). Equipped with insights from graph limit theory, we propose a new graph classification model that works on a randomly sampled subgraph and a novel topology to characterize the representability of the model. Our theoretical framework contributes a theoretical validation of mini-batch learning on graphs and leads to new learning-theoretic results on generalization bounds as well as size-generalizability without assumptions on the input.