  Graph kernels have been successfully applied to many graph classification
problems. Typically, a kernel is first designed, and then an SVM classifier is
trained based on the features defined implicitly by this kernel. This two-stage
approach decouples data representation from learning, which is suboptimal. On
the other hand, Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) have the capability to
learn their own features directly from the raw data during training.
Unfortunately, they cannot handle irregular data such as graphs. We address
this challenge by using graph kernels to embed meaningful local neighborhoods
of the graphs in a continuous vector space. A set of filters is then convolved
with these patches, pooled, and the output is then passed to a feedforward
network. With limited parameter tuning, our approach outperforms strong
baselines on 7 out of 10 benchmark datasets.
