Introduction to Graph Neural Networks
Chapter 1: Foundations of Graph-Based Learning
What is Graph Data?
Limitations of Standard Neural Networks on Graphs
Common Graph Machine Learning Tasks
Representing Graphs: Adjacency and Feature Matrices
Graph Properties and Measurements
Introduction to the NetworkX Library
Hands-on: Loading and Inspecting a Graph Dataset
Chapter 2: The Message Passing Mechanism
The Neighborhood Aggregation Idea
A General GNN Layer: Aggregate and Update
Common Aggregation Functions
Update Functions and Non-Linearities
Permutation Invariance and Equivariance
Stacking Layers to Form a Deep GNN
Practice: A Simple GNN Layer with NumPy
Chapter 3: Foundational GNN Architectures
Graph Convolutional Networks (GCN)
A Spatial Interpretation of Graph Convolutions
GraphSAGE: Sampling and Aggregating Neighborhoods
Inductive Learning with GraphSAGE
Graph Attention Networks (GAT)
The Attention Mechanism in GATs
Comparing GCN, GraphSAGE, and GAT
Hands-on: Implementing a GCN from Scratch
Chapter 4: Training GNN Models
Setting up a GNN for Node Classification
Loss Functions for Graph Tasks
The Training Loop for GNNs
Data Splitting in Graphs: Transductive vs. Inductive
Evaluation Metrics for Node Classification
Overfitting and Regularization in GNNs
Practice: Training and Evaluating your GCN
Chapter 5: GNN Implementation with PyTorch Geometric
Introduction to PyTorch Geometric (PyG)
The PyG Data Object
Working with PyG Datasets
Building Models with PyG GNN Layers
Mini-Batching for Large Graphs
A Complete Training Script in PyG
Hands-on: Node Classification on the Cora Dataset with PyG
Stacking Layers to Form a Deep GNN
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- Semi-Supervised Classification with Graph Convolutional Networks, Thomas N. Kipf and Max Welling, 2017 International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR) DOI: 10.48550/arXiv.1609.02907 - Presents the Graph Convolutional Network (GCN) architecture, demonstrating how to stack message passing layers to derive node representations in graphs.
- Graph Representation Learning, William L. Hamilton, 2020 Synthesis Lectures on Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning, Vol. 14, No. 3 (Morgan & Claypool Publishers) DOI: 10.2200/S01045ED1V01Y202009AIM046 - Offers a systematic discussion of graph representation learning, including message passing, layer stacking for expanded receptive fields, and over-smoothing.
- CS224W: Machine Learning with Graphs, Jure Leskovec, 2025 - A leading university course covering graph neural networks, message passing, node receptive fields, and practical concerns like over-smoothing, with clear explanations.