We consider a family of problems that are concerned about making predictions for the majority of unlabeled, graph-structured data samples based on a small proportion of labeled samples. Relational information among the data samples, often encoded in the graph/network structure, is shown to be helpful for these semi-supervised learning tasks. However, conventional graph-based regularization methods and recent graph neural networks do not fully leverage the interrelations between the features, the graph, and the labels. In this work, we propose a flexible generative framework for graph-based semi-supervised learning, which approaches the joint distribution of the node features, labels, and the graph structure. Borrowing insights from random graph models in network science literature, this joint distribution can be instantiated using various distribution families. For the inference of missing labels, we exploit recent advances of scalable variational inference techniques to approximate the Bayesian posterior. We conduct thorough experiments on benchmark datasets for graph-based semi-supervised learning. Results show that the proposed methods outperform the state-of-the-art models in most settings.
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A Harmonic Extension Approach to Collaborative Ranking
We present a new perspective on graph based methods for collaborative ranking for recommender systems. Unlike user-based or item-based methods that compute a weighted average of ratings given by the nearest neighbors, or low-rank approximation methods using convex optimization and the nuclear norm, we formulate matrix completion as a series of semi-supervised learning problems, and propagate the known ratings to the missing ones on the user-user or item-item graph globally. The semi-supervised learning problems are expressed as Laplace-Beltrami equations on a manifold, or namely, harmonic extension, and can be discretized by a point integral method. Our approach, named LDM (low dimensional manifold), does not impose a low-rank Euclidean subspace on the data points, but instead minimizes the dimension of the underlying manifold. It turns out to be particularly effective in generating rankings of items, showing decent computational efficiency and robust ranking quality compared to state-of-the-art methods.
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- Award ID(s):
- 1737770
- PAR ID:
- 10048858
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- International Symposium on Nonlinear Theory and its Applications
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 318-321
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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