iGraphMix: Input Graph Mixup Method for Node Classification

Recently, Input Mixup, which augments virtual samples by interpolating input features and corresponding labels, is one of the promising methods to alleviate the over-fitting problem on various domains including image classification and natural language processing because of its ability to generate a variety of virtual samples, and ease of usability and versatility. However, designing Input Mixup for the node classification is still challenging due to the irregularity issue that each node contains a different number of neighboring nodes for input and the alignment issue that how to align and interpolate two sets of neighboring nodes is not well-defined when two nodes are interpolated. To address the issues, this paper proposes a novel Mixup method, called iGraphMix, tailored to node classification. Our method generates virtual nodes and their edges by interpolating input features and labels, and attaching sampled neighboring nodes. The virtual graphs generated by iGraphMix serve as inputs for graph neural networks (GNNs) training, thereby facilitating its easy application to various GNNs and enabling effective combination with other augmentation methods. We mathematically prove that training GNNs with iGraphMix leads to better generalization performance compared to that without augmentation, and our experiments support the theoretical findings.