Graph matching as a graph convolution operator for graph neural networks

Convolutional neural networks (CNNs), in a few decades, have outperformed the existing state of the art methods in classification context. However, in the way they were formalised, CNNs are bound to operate on euclidean spaces. Indeed, convolution is a signal operation that are defined on euclidean spaces. This has restricted deep learning main use to euclidean-defined data such as sound or image. And yet, numerous computer application fields (among which network analysis, computational social science, chemo-informatics or computer graphics) induce non-euclideanly defined data such as graphs, networks or manifolds. In this paper we propose a new convolution neural network architecture, defined directly into graph space. Convolution and pooling operators are defined in graph domain thanks to a graph matching procedure between the input signal and a filter. We show its usability in a back-propagation context. Experimental results show that our model performance is at state of the art level on simple tasks. It shows robustness with respect to graph domain changes and improvement with respect to other euclidean and non-euclidean convolutional architectures. © 2021 Elsevier B.V.