Graph Classification with 2D Convolutional Neural Networks

Abstract: Graph learning is currently dominated by graph kernels, which, while powerful, suffer some significant limitations. Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) offer a very appealing alternative, but processing graphs with CNNs is not trivial. To address this challenge, many sophisticated extensions of CNNs have recently been introduced. In this paper, we reverse the problem: rather than proposing yet another graph CNN model, we introduce a novel way to represent graphs as multi-channel image-like structures that allows them to be handled by vanilla 2D CNNs. Experiments reveal that our method is more accurate than state-of-the-art graph kernels and graph CNNs on 4 out of 6 real-world datasets (with and without continuous node attributes), and close elsewhere. Our approach is also preferable to graph kernels in terms of time complexity. Code and data are publicly available.