On Information Granulation via Data Clustering for Granular Computing-Based Pattern Recognition: A Graph Embedding Case Study

Granular Computing is a powerful information processing paradigm, particularly useful for the synthesis of pattern recognition systems in structured domains (e.g., graphs or sequences). According to this paradigm, granules of information play the pivotal role of describing the underlying (possibly complex) process, starting from the available data. Under a pattern recognition viewpoint, granules of information can be exploited for the synthesis of semantically sound embedding spaces, where common supervised or unsupervised problems can be solved via standard machine learning algorithms. In this work, we show a comparison between different strategies for the automatic synthesis of information granules in the context of graph classification. These strategies mainly differ on the specific topology adopted for subgraphs considered as candidate information granules and the possibility of using or neglecting the ground-truth class labels in the granulation process. Computational results on 10 different open-access datasets show that by using a class-aware granulation, performances tend to improve (regardless of the information granules topology), counterbalanced by a possibly higher number of information granules.