Step Into Balance: A Consistency-Aware and Loose Homophily Guided Generative Method for Class-Imbalanced Graphs

Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have demonstrated remarkable success in various scenarios. However, their impressive performance is under the assumption of class balance (i.e., equal training sample distribution across various categories). Once trapped in the class-imbalanced issue, the GNN-based models typically under-represent the minority ones, resulting in decreased performance compared to balanced graphs. A promising solution is to balance the graph in a generative manner. However, the existing studies overlook the consistency between the synthesized sample and its corresponding class. Furthermore, the homophily assumption (i.e., like attracts like) undermines the topological diversity of graphs, thereby complicating the capability of models to capture the true distribution and boundaries of the categories. To this end, we propose aConsistency-Aware andLooseHomophily guided generative method for class-imbalanced graphs, namelyGraphCALH. Specifically, we design a consistency-aware feature synthesis method to balance the node- wise characteristics and the class- wise commonality for the synthesized samples. Moreover, we devise a loose homophily guided topology modeling method to enrich the topological diversity and simplify category boundaries. The experimental results on eleven class-imbalanced datasets demonstrate that the proposed GraphCALH outperforms ten state-of-the-art methods. The source code of this work will be uploaded to Github.