Attentional Multilabel Learning over Graphs - A message passing approach

We address a largely open problem of multilabel classification over graphs. Unlike traditional vector input, graph has rich variable-size structures, that suggests complex relationships between labels and subgraphs. Uncovering these relations might hold the keys of classification performance and explainability. To this end, we design GAML (Graph Attentional Multi-Label learning), a graph neural network that models the relations present in the input graph, in the label set, and across graph-labels by leveraging the message passing algorithm and attention mechanism. Representation of labels and input nodes is refined iteratively through multiple steps, during which interesting subgraph-label patterns emerge. In addition, GAML is highly flexible by allowing explicit label dependencies to be incorporated easily. It also scales linearly with the number of labels and graph size thanks to our proposed hierarchical attention. These properties open a wide range of applications seen in the real-world. We evaluate GAML on an extensive set of experiments with both graph inputs (for predicting drug-protein binding, and drug-cancer response), and classical unstructured inputs. The results are significantly better than well-known multilabel learning techniques.