Multi-view graph pooling with coarsened graph disentanglement

Abstract

Multi-view graph pooling utilizes information from multiple perspectives to generate a coarsened graph, exhibiting superior performance in graph-level tasks. However, existing methods mainly focus on the types of multi-view information to improve graph pooling operations, lacking explicit control over the pooling process and theoretical analysis of the relationships between views. In this paper, we rethink the current paradigm of multi-view graph pooling from an information theory perspective, subsequently introducing GDMGP, an innovative method for multi-view graph pooling derived from the principles of graph disentanglement. This approach effectively simplifies the original graph into a more structured, disentangled coarsened graph, enhancing the clarity and utility of the graph representation. Our approach begins with the design of a novel view mapper that dynamically integrates the node and topology information of the original graph. This integration enhances its information sufficiency. Next, we introduce a view fusion mechanism based on conditional entropy to accurately regulate the task-relevant information in the views, aiming to minimize information loss in the pooling process. Finally, to further enhance the expressiveness of the coarsened graph, we disentangle the fused view into task-relevant and task-irrelevant subgraphs through mutual information minimization, retaining the task-relevant subgraph for downstream tasks. We theoretically demonstrate that the performance of the coarsened graph generated by our GDMGP is superior to that of any single input view. The effectiveness of GDMGP is further validated by experimental results on seven public datasets.