Post #169

Gradient Boosting Meets Graph Neural Networks for Heterogeneous Data We have two short paper submissions this year to GRL workshop this year. One of them is about application of gradient boosting decision trees (GBDT) to graphs. We know that Xgboost, LightGBM, and CatBoost perform extremely well on tabular data and are preferred methods for competitions like Kaggle. But how do you generalize it to graph-structured data? A naïve approach is to train first GBDT on node features only, ignoring graph topology and then use predictions as additional features to your model. But that misses graph information, possibly leading to inaccurate predictions. Instead, we propose to train GBDT and GNN end-to-end such that each tree of GBDT approximates mistakes made by GNN in the forward passes. We call the model Boosted Graph Neural Network and show that it can lead to significant uplift in performance in node regression task, while being very efficient.