Multi-View Graph Convolutional Networks with Differentiable Node Selection

Multi-view data containing complementary and consensus information can facilitate representation learning by exploiting the intact integration of multi-view features. Because most objects in the real world often have underlying connections, organizing multi-view data as heterogeneous graphs is beneficial to extracting latent information among different objects. Due to the powerful capability to gather information of neighborhood nodes, in this article, we apply Graph Convolutional Network (GCN) to cope with heterogeneous graph data originating from multi-view data, which is still under-explored in the field of GCN. In order to improve the quality of network topology and alleviate the interference of noises yielded by graph fusion, some methods undertake sorting operations before the graph convolution procedure. These GCN-based methods generally sort and select the most confident neighborhood nodes for each vertex, such as picking the top-k nodes according to pre-defined confidence values. Nonetheless, this is problematic due to the non-differentiable sorting operators and inflexible graph embedding learning, which may result in blocked gradient computations and undesired performance. To cope with these issues, we propose a joint framework dubbed Multi-view Graph Convolutional Network with Differentiable Node Selection (MGCN-DNS), which is constituted of an adaptive graph fusion layer, a graph learning module, and a differentiable node selection schema. MGCN-DNS accepts multi-channel graph-structural data as inputs and aims to learn more robust graph fusion through a differentiable neural network. The effectiveness of the proposed method is verified by rigorous comparisons with considerable state-of-the-art approaches in terms of multi-view semi-supervised classification tasks, and the experimental results indicate that MGCN-DNS achieves pleasurable performance on several benchmark multi-view datasets.