MDGCL: Graph Contrastive Learning Framework with Multiple Graph Diffusion Methods

In recent years, some classical graph contrastive learning(GCL) frameworks have been proposed to address the problem of sparse labeling of graph data in the real world. However, in node classification tasks, there are two obvious problems with existing GCL frameworks: first, the stochastic augmentation methods they adopt lose a lot of semantic information; second, the local–local contrasting mode selected by most frameworks ignores the global semantic information of the original graph, which limits the node classification performance of these frameworks. To address the above problems, this paper proposes a novel graph contrastive learning framework, MDGCL, which introduces two graph diffusion methods, Markov and PPR, and a deterministic–stochastic data augmentation strategy while retaining the local–local contrasting mode. Specifically, before using the two stochastic augmentation methods (FeatureDrop and EdgeDrop), MDGCL first uses two deterministic augmentation methods (Markov diffusion and PPR diffusion) to perform data augmentation on the original graph to increase the semantic information, this step ensures subsequent stochastic augmentation methods do not lose too much semantic information. Meanwhile, the diffusion matrices carried by the augmented views contain global semantic information of the original graph, allowing the framework to utilize the global semantic information while retaining the local-local contrasting mode, which further enhances the node classification performance of the framework. We conduct extensive comparative experiments on multiple benchmark datasets, and the results show that MDGCL outperforms the representative baseline frameworks on node classification tasks. Among them, compared with COSTA, MDGCL’s node classification accuracy has been improved by 1.07% and 0.41% respectively on two representative datasets, Amazon-Photo and Coauthor-CS. In addition, we also conduct ablation experiments on two datasets, Cora and CiteSeer, to verify the effectiveness of each improvement work of our framework.