{"about":{"site":"https://codewithpapers.app","non_affiliation":"Code with Papers and Syntology are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Papers with Code, Meta, or the pwc-archive mirror.","licence":"CC BY-SA 4.0","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","attribution":"https://codewithpapers.app/attribution","modified":"archive material modified by Syntology; see the attribution page"},"url":"/paper/interpretable-and-efficient-heterogeneous","title":"Interpretable and Efficient Heterogeneous Graph Convolutional Network","arxiv_id":"2005.13183","date":"2020-05-27","proceeding":null,"authors":["Yaming Yang","Ziyu Guan","Jian-Xin Li","Wei Zhao","Jiangtao Cui","Quan Wang"],"abstract":"Graph Convolutional Network (GCN) has achieved extraordinary success in learning effective task-specific representations of nodes in graphs. However, regarding Heterogeneous Information Network (HIN), existing HIN-oriented GCN methods still suffer from two deficiencies: (1) they cannot flexibly explore all possible meta-paths and extract the most useful ones for a target object, which hinders both effectiveness and interpretability; (2) they often need to generate intermediate meta-path based dense graphs, which leads to high computational complexity. To address the above issues, we propose an interpretable and efficient Heterogeneous Graph Convolutional Network (ie-HGCN) to learn the representations of objects in HINs. It is designed as a hierarchical aggregation architecture, i.e., object-level aggregation first, followed by type-level aggregation. The novel architecture can automatically extract useful meta-paths for each object from all possible meta-paths (within a length limit), which brings good model interpretability. It can also reduce the computational cost by avoiding intermediate HIN transformation and neighborhood attention. We provide theoretical analysis about the proposed ie-HGCN in terms of evaluating the usefulness of all possible meta-paths, its connection to the spectral graph convolution on HINs, and its quasi-linear time complexity. Extensive experiments on three real network datasets demonstrate the superiority of ie-HGCN over the state-of-the-art methods.","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2005.13183v3","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2005.13183v3.pdf","source":{"archive":"pwc-archive (Hugging Face), CC BY-SA 4.0","snapshot":"2025-07-28","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","row_kind":"abstracts"},"code_links":[{"paper_slug":"interpretable-and-efficient-heterogeneous","repo_url":"https://github.com/kepsail/ie-HGCN","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":1,"mentioned_in_github":1,"framework":"pytorch","reach":{"status":"ok"}}],"tasks":[{"task_slug":"object","task_name":"Object"}],"methods":[{"method_slug":"convolution","method_name":"Convolution"},{"method_slug":"gcn","method_name":"GCN"}],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"atlas_url":"https://app.syntology.ai/?focus=2005.13183","mcp":null,"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers"},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}