GATSMOTE: Improving Imbalanced Node Classification on Graphs via Attention and Homophily

Abstract

In recent decades, non-invasive neuroimaging techniques and graph theories have enabled a better understanding of the structural patterns of the human brain at a macroscopic level. As one of the most widely used non-invasive techniques, an electroencephalogram (EEG) may collect non-neuronal signals from “bad channels”. Automatically detecting these bad channels represents an imbalanced classification task; research on the topic is rather limited. Because the human brain can be naturally modeled as a complex graph network based on its structural and functional characteristics, we seek to extend previous imbalanced node classification techniques to the bad-channel detection task. We specifically propose a novel edge generator considering the prominent small-world organization of the human brain network. We leverage the attention mechanism to adaptively calculate the weighted edge connections between each node and its neighboring nodes. Moreover, we follow the homophily assumption in graph theory to add edges between similar nodes. Adding new edges between nodes sharing identical labels shortens the path length, thus facilitating low-cost information messaging.