Graph convolutional networks: analysis, improvements and results

A graph can represent a complex organization of data in which dependencies exist between multiple entities or activities. Such complex structures create challenges for machine learning algorithms, particularly when combined with the high dimensionality of data in current applications. Graph convolutional networks were introduced to adopt concepts from deep convolutional networks (i.e. the convolutional operations/layers) that have shown good results. In this context, we propose two major enhancements to two of the existing graph convolutional network frameworks: (1) topological information enrichment through clustering coefficients; and (2) structural redesign of the network through the addition of dense layers. Furthermore, we propose minor enhancements using convex combinations of activation functions and hyper-parameter optimization. We present extensive results on four state-of-art benchmark datasets. We show that our approach achieves competitive results for three of the datasets and state-of-the-art results for the fourth dataset while having lower computational costs compared to competing methods.