Data Augmentation for Graph Classification

Abstract

Graph classification, which aims to identify the category labels of graphs, plays a significant role in drug classification, toxicity detection, protein analysis etc. However, the limitation of scale of benchmark datasets makes it easy for graph classification models to fall into over-fitting and undergeneralization. Towards this, we introduce data augmentation on graphs and present two heuristic algorithms: random mapping and motif-similarity mapping, to generate more weakly labeled data for small-scale benchmark datasets via heuristic modification of graph structures. Furthermore, we propose a generic model evolution framework, M-Evolve, which combines graph augmentation, data filtration and model retraining to optimize pre-trained graph classifiers. Experiments conducted on six benchmark datasets demonstrate that M-Evolve helps existing graph classification models alleviate over-fitting when training on small-scale benchmark datasets and yields an average improvement of 3-12% accuracy on graph classification tasks.