English

Variational Graph Convolutional Neural Networks

Machine Learning 2025-07-03 v1

Abstract

Estimation of model uncertainty can help improve the explainability of Graph Convolutional Networks and the accuracy of the models at the same time. Uncertainty can also be used in critical applications to verify the results of the model by an expert or additional models. In this paper, we propose Variational Neural Network versions of spatial and spatio-temporal Graph Convolutional Networks. We estimate uncertainty in both outputs and layer-wise attentions of the models, which has the potential for improving model explainability. We showcase the benefits of these models in the social trading analysis and the skeleton-based human action recognition tasks on the Finnish board membership, NTU-60, NTU-120 and Kinetics datasets, where we show improvement in model accuracy in addition to estimated model uncertainties.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2507.01699,
  title  = {Variational Graph Convolutional Neural Networks},
  author = {Illia Oleksiienko and Juho Kanniainen and Alexandros Iosifidis},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2507.01699},
  year   = {2025}
}

Comments

This work has been submitted to the IEEE for possible publication. 9 pages, 6 figures

R2 v1 2026-07-01T03:43:13.524Z