# Catch Causal Signals from Edges for Label Imbalance in Graph Classification

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2501.01707 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.01707/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 20 of its 39 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 3 Jan 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 20 of 20)

- [Semi-Supervised Classification with Graph Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1609.02907/) (2016)
- [Graph Attention Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1710.10903/) (2017)
- [A Comprehensive Survey on Graph Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1901.00596/) (2019)
- [Open Graph Benchmark: Datasets for Machine Learning on Graphs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.00687/) (2020)
- [Strategies for Pre-training Graph Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.12265/) (2019)
- [Convolutional Networks on Graphs for Learning Molecular Fingerprints](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1509.09292/) (2015)
- [Analyzing Learned Molecular Representations for Property Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.01561/) (2019)
- [GraphSMOTE: Imbalanced Node Classification on Graphs with Graph Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.08826/) (2021)
- [Learning Causally Invariant Representations for Out-of-Distribution Generalization on Graphs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.05441/) (2022)
- [GOOD: A Graph Out-of-Distribution Benchmark](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.08452/) (2022)
- [Causal Attention for Interpretable and Generalizable Graph Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.15089/) (2021)
- [Trustworthy Graph Neural Networks: Aspects, Methods and Trends](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.07424/) (2022)
- [Generalizing Graph Neural Networks on Out-Of-Distribution Graphs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.10657/) (2021)
- [A Survey of Graph Neural Networks in Real world: Imbalance, Noise, Privacy and OOD Challenges](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.04468/) (2024)
- [Joint Learning of Label and Environment Causal Independence for Graph Out-of-Distribution Generalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.01103/) (2023)
- [Imbalanced Graph Classification via Graph-of-Graph Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.00238/) (2021)
- [Environment-Aware Dynamic Graph Learning for Out-of-Distribution Generalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.11114/) (2023)
- [Recent Advances in Reliable Deep Graph Learning: Inherent Noise, Distribution Shift, and Adversarial Attack](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.07114/) (2022)
- [Out-of-Distribution Generalized Dynamic Graph Neural Network with Disentangled Intervention and Invariance Promotion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.14255/) (2023)
- [Towards Human-like Perception: Learning Structural Causal Model in Heterogeneous Graph](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.05757/) (2023)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Despite significant advancements in causal research on graphs and its application to cracking label imbalance, the role of edge features in detecting the causal effects within graphs has been largely overlooked, leaving existing methods with untapped potential for further performance gains. In this paper, we enhance the causal attention mechanism through effectively leveraging edge information to disentangle the causal subgraph from the original graph, as well as further utilizing edge features to reshape graph representations. Capturing more comprehensive causal signals, our design leads to improved performance on graph classification tasks with label imbalance issues. We evaluate our approach on real-word datasets PTC, Tox21, and ogbg-molhiv, observing improvements over baselines. Overall, we highlight the importance of edge features in graph causal detection and provide a promising direction for addressing label imbalance challenges in graph-level tasks. The model implementation details and the codes are available on https://github.com/fengrui-z/ECAL