A comprehensive review of graph convolutional networks: approaches and applications

Convolutional neural networks (CNNs) utilize local translation invariance in the Euclidean domain and have remarkable achievements in computer vision tasks. However, there are many data types with non-Euclidean structures, such as social networks, chemical molecules, knowledge graphs, etc., which are crucial to real-world applications. The graph convolutional neural network (GCN), as a derivative of CNNs for non-Euclidean data, was established for non-Euclidean graph data. In this paper, we mainly survey the progress of GCNs and introduce in detail several basic models based on GCNs. First, we review the challenges in building GCNs, including large-scale graph data, directed graphs and multi-scale graph tasks. Also, we briefly discuss some applications of GCNs, including computer vision, transportation networks and other fields. Furthermore, we point out some open issues and highlight some future research trends for GCNs.