Graphite: Iterative Generative Modeling of Graphs
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Graphs are a fundamental abstraction for modeling relational data. However, graphs are discrete and combinatorial in nature, and learning representations suitable for machine learning tasks poses statistical and computational challenges. In this work, we propose Graphite an algorithmic framework for unsupervised learning of representations over nodes in a graph using deep latent variable generative models. Our model is based on variational autoencoders (VAE), and differs from existing VAE frameworks for data modalities such as images, speech, and text in the use of graph neural networks for parameterizing both the generative model (i.e., decoder) and inference model (i.e., encoder). The use of graph neural networks directly incorporates inductive biases due to the spatial, local structure of graphs directly in the generative model. Moreover, we draw novel connections between graph neural networks and approximate inference via kernel embeddings of distributions. We demonstrate empirically that Graphite outperforms state-of-the-art approaches for the tasks of density estimation, link prediction, and node classification on synthetic and benchmark datasets.
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