HITS-based Propagation Paradigm for Graph Neural Networks

Abstract

In this article, we present a new propagation paradigm based on the principle of Hyperlink-Induced Topic Search (HITS) algorithm. The HITS algorithm utilizes the concept of a “self-reinforcing” relationship of authority-hub. Using HITS, the centrality of nodes is determined via repeated updates of authority-hub scores that converge to a stationary distribution. Unlike PageRank-based propagation methods, which rely solely on the idea of authorities (in-links), HITS considers the relevance of both authorities (in-links) and hubs (out-links), thereby allowing for a more informative graph learning process. To segregate node prediction and propagation, we use a Multilayer Perceptron in combination with a HITS-based propagation approach and propose two models: HITS-GNN and HITS-GNN+. We provided additional validation of our models’ efficacy by performing an ablation study to assess the performance of authority-hub in independent models. Moreover, the effect of the main hyper-parameters and normalization is also analyzed to uncover how these techniques influence the performance of our models. Extensive experimental results indicate that the proposed approach significantly improves baseline methods on the graph (citation network) benchmark datasets by a decent margin for semi-supervised node classification, which can aid in predicting the categories (labels) of scientific articles not exclusively based on their content but also based on the type of articles they cite.