Graph-Hist: Graph Classification from Latent Feature Histograms With
  Application to Bot Detection

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Abstract

Neural networks are increasingly used for graph classification in a variety of contexts. Social media is a critical application area in this space, however the characteristics of social media graphs differ from those seen in most popular benchmark datasets. Social networks tend to be large and sparse, while benchmarks are small and dense. Classically, large and sparse networks are analyzed by studying the distribution of local properties. Inspired by this, we introduce Graph-Hist: an end-to-end architecture that extracts a graph's latent local features, bins nodes together along 1-D cross sections of the feature space, and classifies the graph based on this multi-channel histogram. We show that Graph-Hist improves state of the art performance on true social media benchmark datasets, while still performing well on other benchmarks. Finally, we demonstrate Graph-Hist's performance by conducting bot detection in social media. While sophisticated bot and cyborg accounts increasingly evade traditional detection methods, they leave artificial artifacts in their conversational graph that are detected through graph classification. We apply Graph-Hist to classify these conversational graphs. In the process, we confirm that social media graphs are different than most baselines and that Graph-Hist outperforms existing bot-detection models.

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The graph neural network model.

F. Scarselli, M. Gori, Ah Chung Tsoi … (2009)

Many underlying relationships among data in several areas of science and engineering, e.g., computer vision, molecular chemistry, molecular biology, pattern recognition, and data mining, can be represented in terms of graphs. In this paper, we propose a new neural network model, called graph neural network (GNN) model, that extends existing neural network methods for processing the data represented in graph domains. This GNN model, which can directly process most of the practically useful types of graphs, e.g., acyclic, cyclic, directed, and undirected, implements a function tau(G,n) is an element of IR(m) that maps a graph G and one of its nodes n into an m-dimensional Euclidean space. A supervised learning algorithm is derived to estimate the parameters of the proposed GNN model. The computational cost of the proposed algorithm is also considered. Some experimental results are shown to validate the proposed learning algorithm, and to demonstrate its generalization capabilities.