Long-Tailed Recognition of Evidential Experts for Graph-level Classification

Graph-level classification involves analyzing the property of the whole graph, which is typically solved by using graph neural networks (GNNs). Existing efforts generally assume a balanced class distribution. However, real-world data often exhibit long-tailed distributions, i.e., tail classes have significantly fewer samples than head classes, and thus directly applying GNNs is eventually biased toward the head classes, resulting in limited generalization over the tail classes. Moreover, the predictions of existing algorithms are usually not trustworthy, and the trained classifiers remain ignorant to their predictive confidence. Towards this end, in this paper we develop a principled framework called GraphEVER for long-tailed graph-level classification. Technically, GraphEVER incorporates the beliefs of multiple experts and leverages the idea of subjective logic within the Dempster-Shafer Evidence Theory (DST). It can provide the evidence and uncertainty estimation for each expert, where the evidence is parameterized by a Dirichlet distribution to model class probability distribution, and the uncertainty is quantified via a well-defined theoretical framework. In this way, diverse experts can be integrated under DST to endow the classifier with both reliability and robustness. Moreover, we propose an evidence-based routing mechanism to dynamically assign experts, such that the tail classes can receive more attention, while the head classes can reduce redundant engaged experts, further cutting down the computational cost and improving the efficiency. Extensive experiments on seven datasets verify the superiority of our proposed framework.