Belief Propagation Network for Hard Inductive Semi-Supervised Learning

Given graph-structured data, how can we train a robust classifier in a semi-supervised setting that performs well without neighborhood information? In this work, we propose belief propagation networks (BPN), a novel approach to train a deep neural network in a hard inductive setting, where the test data are given without neighborhood information. BPN uses a differentiable classifier to compute the prior distributions of nodes, and then diffuses the priors through the graphical structure, independently from the prior computation. This separable structure improves the generalization performance of BPN for isolated test instances, compared with previous approaches that jointly use the feature and neighborhood without distinction. As a result, BPN outperforms state-of-the-art methods in four datasets with an average margin of 2.4% points in accuracy.