Graph Convolutional Networks (GCNs) are a class of neural networks specifically designed to operate on graph-structured data. Unlike traditional Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs), which process grid-like data such as images, GCNs leverage the relationships and connectivity between nodes in a graph to learn representations. The core idea is to aggregate features from a node's neighbors, allowing the network to capture both local and global structures within the graph.
Mathematically, this can be expressed as:
where:
Through multiple layers, GCNs can learn rich embeddings that facilitate various tasks such as node classification, link prediction, and graph classification. Their ability to incorporate the topology of graphs makes them powerful tools in fields such as social network analysis, molecular chemistry, and recommendation systems.
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