Graph processing system and method using sparse decomposition

A system comprising one or more processing devices and one or more memories, and being configured for processing a graph, the graph comprising a data structure that defines nodes that represent entities and edges that represent relationships between the nodes, each node having an associated feature vector that specifies a set of feature values for the node, the processing comprising:

• performing an inference process comprising:
• receiving a prediction request for a subject node of the graph;
• obtaining a sparse node approximation for the subject node, the sparse node approximation defining a weighted combination of a subset of nodes of the graph as receptive nodes for the subject node;
• applying a neural network based transformation function based on the sparse node approximation to generate a node representation for the subject node;
• performing a prediction task based on the generated node representation to generate a prediction for the subject node;
• and
• outputting the prediction.

A computer readable medium storing non-transient instructions for configuring a computer system to process a graph, the graph comprising a data structure that defines nodes that represent entities and edges that represent relationships between the nodes, each node having an associated feature vector that specifies a set of feature values for the node, the processing comprising:

• performing an inference process comprising:
• receiving a prediction request for a subject node of the graph;
• obtaining a sparse node approximation for the subject node, the sparse node approximation defining a weighted combination of a subset of nodes of the graph as receptive nodes for the subject node;
• applying a neural network based transformation function based on the sparse node approximation to generate a node representation for the subject node;
• performing a prediction task based on the generated node representation to generate a prediction for the subject node;
• and
• outputting the prediction.