Background: It is often the case that only a portion of the underlying network structure is observed in real-world settings. However, as most network analysis methods are built on a complete network structure, the natural questions to ask are: (a) how well these methods perform with incomplete network structure, (b) which structural observation and network analysis method to choose for a specific task, and (c) is it beneficial to complete the missing structure. Methods: In this paper, we consider the incomplete network structure as one random sampling instance from a complete graph, and we choose graph neural networks (GNNs), which have achieved promising results on various graph learning tasks, as the representative of network analysis methods. To identify the robustness of GNNs under graph sampling scenarios, we systemically evaluated six state-of-the-art GNNs under four commonly used graph sampling methods. Results: We show that GNNs can still be applied on single static networks under graph sampling scenarios, and simpler GNN models are able to outperform more sophisticated ones in a fairly experimental procedure. More importantly, we find that completing the sampled subgraph does improve the performance of downstream tasks in most cases; however, completion is not always effective and needs to be evaluated for a specific dataset. Our code is available at https://github.com/weiqianglg/evaluate-GNNs-under-graph-sampling.

Collected network data are often incomplete, with both missing nodes and missing edges. Thus, network completion that infers the unobserved part of the network is essential for downstream tasks. Despite the emerging literature related to network recovery, the potential information has not been effectively exploited. In this paper, we propose a novel unified deep graph convolutional network that infers missing edges by leveraging node labels, features, and distances. Specifically, we first construct an estimated network topology for the unobserved part using node labels, then jointly refine the network topology and learn the edge likelihood with node labels, node features and distances. Extensive experiments using several real-world datasets show the superiority of our method compared with the state-of-the-art approaches.