Molecular Graph Representation Learning via Heterogeneous Motif Graph Construction

We consider feature representation learning problem of molecular graphs. Graph Neural Networks have been widely used in feature representation learning of molecular graphs. However, most existing methods deal with molecular graphs individually while neglecting their connections, such as motif-level relationships. We propose a novel molecular graph representation learning method by constructing a heterogeneous motif graph to address this issue. In particular, we build a heterogeneous motif graph that contains motif nodes and molecular nodes. Each motif node corresponds to a motif extracted from molecules. Then, we propose a Heterogeneous Motif Graph Neural Network (HM-GNN) to learn feature representations for each node in the heterogeneous motif graph. Our heterogeneous motif graph also enables effective multi-task learning, especially for small molecular datasets. To address the potential efficiency issue, we propose to use an edge sampler, which can significantly reduce computational resources usage. The experimental results show that our model consistently outperforms previous state-of-the-art models. Under multi-task settings, the promising performances of our methods on combined datasets shed light on a new learning paradigm for small molecular datasets. Finally, we show that our model achieves similar performances with significantly less computational resources by using our edge sampler.