Pure Node Selection for Imbalanced Graph Node Classification

Abstract

The problem of class imbalance refers to an uneven distribution of quantity among classes in a dataset, where some classes are significantly underrepresented compared to others. Class imbalance is also prevalent in graph-structured data. Graph neural networks (GNNs) are typically based on the assumption of class balance, often overlooking the issue of class imbalance. In our investigation, we identified a problem, which we term the Randomness Anomalous Connectivity Problem (RACP), where certain off-the-shelf models are affected by random seeds, leading to a significant performance degradation. To eliminate the influence of random factors in algorithms, we proposed PNS (Pure Node Sampling) to address the RACP in the node synthesis stage. Unlike existing approaches that design specialized algorithms to handle either quantity imbalance or topological imbalance, PNS is a novel plug-and-play module that operates directly during node synthesis to mitigate RACP. Moreover, PNS also alleviates performance degradation caused by abnormal distribution of node neighbors. We conduct a series of experiments to identify what factors are influenced by random seeds. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness and stability of our method, which not only eliminates the effect of unfavorable random seeds but also outperforms the baseline across various benchmark datasets with different GNN backbones. Data and code are available at https://github.com/flzeng1/PNS.