It's PageRank All The Way Down: Simplifying Deep Graph Networks

Abstract

First developed to rank website relevance, PageRank has become ubiquitous in many areas of graph machine learning including deep learning. We demonstrate that a number of recently published deep graph neural networks are qualitatively equivalent to shallow networks utilizing Personalized PageRank (PPR), and that their performance improvements over existing PPR implementations can be fully explained by hyperparameter choices. We also show that PPR with these hyperparameters outperform more recently published sophisticated variations of PPR-based graph neural networks, and present efficient implementations that reduce training times and memory requirements while improving scalability.