Relation-Aware Diffusion for Heterogeneous Graphs with Partially Observed Features

Diffusion-based imputation methods, which impute missing features through the iterative propagation of observed features, have shown impressive performance in homogeneous graphs. However, these methods are not directly applicable to heterogeneous graphs, which have multiple types of nodes and edges, due to two key issues: (1) the presence of nodes with undefined features hinders diffusion-based imputation; (2) treating various edge types equally during diffusion does not fully utilize information contained in heterogeneous graphs. To address these challenges, this paper presents a novel imputation scheme that enables diffusion-based imputation in heterogeneous graphs. Our key idea involves (1) assigning a {\it virtual feature} to an undefined node feature and (2) determining the importance of each edge type during diffusion according to a new criterion. Through experiments, we demonstrate that our virtual feature scheme effectively serves as a bridge between existing diffusion-based methods and heterogeneous graphs, maintaining the advantages of these methods. Furthermore, we confirm that adjusting the importance of each edge type leads to significant performance gains on heterogeneous graphs. Extensive experimental results demonstrate the superiority of our scheme in both semi-supervised node classification and link prediction tasks on heterogeneous graphs with missing rates ranging from low to exceedingly high. The source code is available at https://github.com/daehoum1/hetgfd.