11 Graph representation learning and graph neural networks
This chapter covers
- Understanding graph representation learning and its role in scaling machine learning on graphs
 - Automating feature engineering with deep learning
 - Understanding graph embeddings and their applications
 - Working with graph neural networks
 
In chapters 9 and 10, we explored the fundamental concepts of machine learning (ML) on graphs, demonstrating how these techniques can solve complex tasks like node classification, link prediction, and community detection. We showed how manual feature engineering can effectively capture graph properties and relationships to power downstream ML tasks. These approaches provide insights into what makes graph-based ML work, offering transparency into how our models make decisions.
However, even simple classification tasks require significant effort to design and implement effective features. Manual approaches excel at interpretability and help build intuition, but they face significant challenges when scaled to real-world knowledge graphs (KGs) containing millions of nodes and relationships.