Data-Driven Higher Order Differential Equations Inspired Graph Neural Networks

Abstract

A recent innovation in Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) is the family of Differential Equation-Inspired Graph Neural Networks (DE-GNNs), which leverage principles from continuous dynamical systems to model information flow on graphs with built-in properties. However, existing DE-GNNs rely on first or second-order temporal orders. In this paper, we propose a neural extension to those pre-defined temporal dependencies. We show that our model, called TDE-GNN, can capture a wide range of temporal dynamics that go beyond typical first or second-order methods, and provide use cases where existing temporal models are challenged. We demonstrate the benefit of learning the temporal dependencies using our method rather than using pre-defined temporal dynamics on several graph benchmarks.