Recurrent Neural Collective Classification

With the recent surge in availability of data sets containing not only individual attributes but also relationships, classification techniques that take advantage of predictive relationship information have gained in popularity. The most popular existing collective classification techniques have a number of limitations-some of them generate arbitrary and potentially lossy summaries of the relationship data, whereas others ignore directionality and strength of relationships. Popular existing techniques make use of only direct neighbor relationships when classifying a given entity, ignoring potentially useful information contained in expanded neighborhoods of radius greater than one. We present a new technique that we call recurrent neural collective classification (RNCC), which avoids arbitrary summarization, uses information about relationship directionality and strength, and through recursive encoding, learns to leverage larger relational neighborhoods around each entity. Experiments with synthetic data sets show that RNCC can make effective use of relationship data for both direct and expanded neighborhoods. Further experiments demonstrate that our technique outperforms previously published results of several collective classification methods on a number of real-world data sets.