Discovering Graph Generation Algorithms

Abstract: We provide a novel approach to construct generative models for graphs. Instead of using the traditional probabilistic models or deep generative models, we propose to instead find an algorithm that generates the data. We achieve this using evolutionary search and a powerful fitness function, implemented by a randomly initialized graph neural network. This brings certain advantages over current deep generative models, for instance, a higher potential for out-of-training-distribution generalization and direct interpretability, as the final graph generative process is expressed as a Python function. We show that this approach can be competitive with deep generative models and under some circumstances can even find the true graph generative process, and as such perfectly generalize.