Gaussian Process with Graph Convolutional Kernel for Relational Learning

Gaussian Process (GP) offers a principled non-parametric framework for learning stochastic functions. The generalization capability of GPs depends heavily on the kernel function, which implicitly imposes the smoothness assumptions of the data. However, common feature-based kernel functions are inefficient to model the relational data, where the smoothness assumptions implied by the kernels are violated. To model the complex and non-differentiable functions over relational data, we propose a novel Graph Convolutional Kernel, which enables to incorporate relational structures to feature-based kernels to capture the statistical structure of data. To validate the effectiveness of proposed kernel function in modeling relational data, we introduce GP models with Graph Convolutional Kernel in two relational learning settings, i.e., unsupervised settings of link prediction and semi-supervised settings of object classification. The parameters of our GP models are optimized through the scalable variational inducing point method. However, the highly structured likelihood objective requires densely sampling from variational distributions, which is costly and makes its optimization challenging in the unsupervised settings. To tackle this challenge, we propose a Local Neighbor Sampling technique with a provable more efficient computational complexity. Experimental results on real-world datasets demonstrate that our model achieves state-of-the-art performance in two relational learning tasks.