FedGL: Federated Graph Learning Framework with Global Self-Supervision

Abstract: Graph data are ubiquitous in the real world. Graph learning (GL) tries to mine and analyze graph data so that valuable information can be discovered. Existing GL methods are designed for centralized scenarios. However, in practical scenarios, graph data are usually distributed in different organizations, i.e., the curse of isolated data islands. To address this problem, we incorporate federated learning into GL and propose a general Federated Graph Learning framework FedGL, which is capable of obtaining a high-quality global graph model while protecting data privacy by discovering the global self-supervision information during the federated training. Concretely, we propose to upload the prediction results and node embeddings to the server for discovering the global pseudo label and global pseudo graph, which are distributed to each client to enrich the training labels and complement the graph structure respectively, thereby improving the quality of each local model. Moreover, the global self-supervision enables the information of each client to flow and share in a privacy-preserving manner, thus alleviating the heterogeneity and utilizing the complementarity of graph data among different clients. Finally, experimental results show that FedGL significantly outperforms baselines on four widely used graph datasets.