Existing Graph Convolutional Networks (GCNs) are shallow---the number of the layers is usually not larger than 2. The deeper variants by simply stacking more layers, unfortunately perform worse, even involving well-known tricks like weight penalizing, dropout, and residual connections. This paper reveals that developing deep GCNs mainly encounters two obstacles: \emph{over-fitting} and \emph{over-smoothing}. The over-fitting issue weakens the generalization ability on small graphs, while over-smoothing impedes model training by isolating output representations from the input features with the increase in network depth. Hence, we propose DropEdge, a novel technique to alleviate both issues. At its core, DropEdge randomly removes a certain number of edges from the input graphs, acting like a data augmenter and also a message passing reducer. More importantly, DropEdge enables us to recast a wider range of Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) from the image field to the graph domain; in particular, we study DenseNet and InceptionNet in this paper. Extensive experiments on several benchmarks demonstrate that our method allows deep GCNs to achieve promising performance, even when the number of layers exceeds 30---the deepest GCN that has ever been proposed.

该论文提出了DropEdge技术来解决深层图卷积网络在节点分类中的过拟合和过度平滑问题。DropEdge技术通过随机在每个训练迭代中移除一定数量的边缘节点来进行数据扩充和信息传递减少，旨在提高广义化效果和模型收敛速度。该技术还可以与其他多个骨干模型一起使用，使得在各种浅层和深层图卷积网络中都能一致提高模型的性能表现。

DropEdge：面向节点分类的深度图卷积网络