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Semi-Supervised Graph Learning Meets Dimensionality Reduction

Semi-supervised learning (SSL) has recently received increased attention from machine learning researchers. By enabling effective propagation of known labels in graph-based deep learning (GDL) algorithms, SSL is poised to become an increasingly used technique in GDL in the coming years. However, there are currently few explorations in the graph-based SSL literature on exploiting classical dimensionality reduction techniques for improved label propagation. In this work, we investigate the use of dimensionality reduction techniques such as PCA, t-SNE, and UMAP to see their effect on the performance of graph neural networks (GNNs) designed for semi-supervised propagation of node labels. Our study makes use of benchmark semi-supervised GDL datasets such as the Cora and Citeseer datasets to allow meaningful comparisons of the representations learned by each algorithm when paired with a dimensionality reduction technique. Our comprehensive benchmarks and clustering visualizations quantitatively and qualitatively demonstrate that, under certain conditions, employing a priori and a posteriori dimensionality reduction to GNN inputs and outputs, respectively, can simultaneously improve the effectiveness of semi-supervised node label propagation and node clustering. Our source code is freely available on GitHub.