Large Scale Learning on Non-Homophilous Graphs: New Benchmarks and Strong Simple Methods

Derek Lim, Felix Matthew Hohne, Xiuyu Li, Sijia Linda Huang, Vaishnavi Gupta, Omkar Prasad Bhalerao, Ser-Nam Lim

Keywords: graph neural network, homophily, graphs, datasets, benchmarks

TL;DR: We propose new datasets and a strong simple method for scalable learning on non-homophilous graphs.

Abstract: Many widely used datasets for graph machine learning tasks have generally been homophilous, where nodes with similar labels connect to each other. Recently, new Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have been developed that move beyond the homophily regime; however, their evaluation has often been conducted on small graphs with limited application domains. We collect and introduce diverse non-homophilous datasets from a variety of application areas that have up to 384x more nodes and 1398x more edges than prior datasets. We further show that existing scalable graph learning and graph minibatching techniques lead to performance degradation on these non-homophilous datasets, thus highlighting the need for further work on scalable non-homophilous methods. To address these concerns, we introduce LINKX --- a strong simple method that admits straightforward minibatch training and inference. Extensive experimental results with representative simple methods and GNNs across our proposed datasets show that LINKX achieves state-of-the-art performance for learning on non-homophilous graphs. Our codes and data are available at https://github.com/CUAI/Non-Homophily-Large-Scale.

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Code: https://github.com/CUAI/Non-Homophily-Large-Scale

Community Implementations: [ 1 code implementation](https://www.catalyzex.com/paper/arxiv:2110.14446/code)