Stability of Graph Neural Networks to Relative Perturbations

Graph neural networks (GNNs), consisting of a cascade of layers applying a graph convolution followed by a pointwise nonlinearity, have become a powerful architecture to process signals supported on graphs. Graph convolutions (and thus, GNNs), rely heavily on knowledge of the graph for operation. However, in many practical cases the graph shift operator (GSO) is not known and needs to be estimated, or might change from training time to testing time. In this paper, we are set to study the effect that a change in the underlying graph topology that supports the signal has on the output of a GNN. We prove that graph convolutions with integral Lipschitz filters lead to GNNs whose output change is bounded by the size of the relative change in the topology. Furthermore, we leverage this result to show that the main reason for the success of GNNs is that they are stable architectures capable of discriminating features on high eigenvalues, which is a feat that cannot be achieved by linear graph filters (which are either stable or discriminative, but cannot be both). Finally, we comment on the use of this result to train GNNs with increased stability and run experiments on movie recommendation systems.