In plain words: They measure curvature, how a graph's connections bend or pinch, then track how those patterns change as the graph is simplified, turning it into a score for comparing generated graphs with real ones. This gives a sturdier, more detailed judgment than plain shape statistics.
Abstract
Graph generative model evaluation necessitates understanding differences between graphs on the distributional level. This entails being able to harness salient attributes of graphs in an efficient manner. Curvature constitutes one such property that has recently proved its utility in characterising graphs. Its expressive properties, stability, and practical utility in model evaluation remain largely unexplored, however. We combine graph curvature descriptors with emerging methods from topological data analysis to obtain robust, expressive descriptors for evaluating graph generative models.
Joshua Southern, Jeremy Wayland, Michael Bronstein, Bastian Rieck
arXiv:2301.12906 · cs.LG, math.AT, stat.ML · submitted Jan 30, 2023 · updated Oct 26, 2023
abstract · pdf · html · Accepted at the 37th Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS) 2023