Self-Representation-Based Generative Graph Neural Networks for End-to-End Link Prediction

Recently, deep neural networks have revolutionized the field of link prediction, and the state-of-the-art works are typically subgraph-based discriminative methods, which construct features of local subgraphs firstly and predicting potential links via deep learning based binary subgraph classification. However, the discriminative link prediction methods always fail to automatically learn features and perform link prediction, and the performance of them depends on the construction of enclosing subgraphs and the manually-designed features for the subgraphs. To address these issues, we leverage the idea of graph disentangling and propose a novel self-representation-based generative graph neural network framework (GraphLP) for end-to-end link prediction, which learns to extract the latent patterns, i.e., recurring subgraphs, from input graphs via self-supervised learning and reconstruct graphs for link prediction using the subgraphs as structural basis. GraphLP consists of three components: self-representation-based collaborative inference, high-order connectivity computation, and multi-scale pattern fusion. The key idea is to utilize the correlations between the extracted recurring subgraphs on different scales to effectively assist link inference. GraphLP also can effectively exploit the hierarchical organization patterns and incorporate them within the representation procedure, producing robust and accurate results. Compared with traditional methods and state-of-the-art methods, experimental results on public benchmark datasets demonstrate that GraphLP achieves promising performance. Different from the discriminative methods, GraphLP provides a new paradigm for generative neural-network-based link prediction.