BHGNN-RT: Capturing bidirectionality and network heterogeneity in graphs

Abstract

Graph neural networks (GNNs) have shown great promise for representation learning on complex graph-structured data, but existing models often fall short when applied to directed heterogeneous graphs. In this study, we proposed a novel embedding method, a bidirectional heterogeneous graph neural network with random teleport (BHGNN-RT) that leverages the bidirectional message-passing process and network heterogeneity, for directed heterogeneous graphs. Our method captures both incoming and outgoing message flows, integrates heterogeneous edge types through relation-specific transformations, and introduces a teleportation mechanism to mitigate the oversmoothing effect in deep GNNs. Extensive experiments were conducted on various datasets to verify the efficacy and efficiency of BHGNN-RT. BHGNN-RT consistently outperforms state-of-the-art baselines, achieving up to 11.5% improvement in classification accuracy and 19.3% in entity clustering. Additional analyses confirm that optimizing message components, model layer and teleportation proportion further enhances the model performance. These results demonstrate the effectiveness and robustness of BHGNN-RT in capturing structural, directional information in directed heterogeneous graphs.