HA-SCN: Learning Hierarchical Aligned Subtree Convolutional Networks for Graph Classification

In this paper, we propose a Hierarchical Aligned Subtree Convolutional Network (HA-SCN) for graph classification. Our idea is to transform graphs of arbitrary sizes into fixed-sized aligned graphs and construct a normalized K-layer m-ary subtree for each node in the aligned graphs. By sliding convolutional filters over the entire subtree at each node, we define a novel subtree convolution and pooling operation that hierarchically abstracts node-level information. We demonstrate that the proposed HA-SCN model not only realizes the convolution mechanism similar to the Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs), which have the characteristics of weight sharing and fixed-sized receptive fields, but also effectively mitigates the over-squashing problem. Meanwhile, it establishes the correspondence information between nodes, alleviating the information loss issue. Experimental results on various benchmark graph datasets show that our approach achieves state-of-the-art performance in graph classification tasks.