---

Website | Position Paper | Benchmark Paper [TODO] | Mailing List

Overview

Relational Deep Learning is a new approach for end-to-end representation learning on data spread across multiple tables, such as in a relational database (see our position paper). Relational databases are the world's most widely used data management system, and are used for industrial and scientific purposes across many domains. RelBench is a benchmark designed to facilitate efficient, robust and reproducible research on end-to-end deep learning over relational databases.

RelBench contains 7 realistic, large-scale, and diverse relational databases spanning domains including medical, social networks, e-commerce and sport. Each database has multiple predictive tasks (30 in total) defined, each carefully scoped to be both challenging and of domain-specific importance. It provides full support for data downloading, task specification and standardized evaluation in an ML-framework-agnostic manner.

Additionally, RelBench provides a first open-source implementation of a Graph Neural Network based approach to relational deep learning. This implementation uses PyTorch Geometric to load the data as a graph and train GNN models, and PyTorch Frame for modeling tabular data. Finally, there is an open leaderboard for tracking progress.

Key Papers

Benchmark Paper [RelBench: A Benchmark for Deep Learning on Relational Databases.]

This paper details our approach to designing the RelBench benchmark. It also includes a key user study showing that relational deep learning can produce performant models with a fraction of the manual human effort required by typical data science pipelines. This paper is useful for a detailed understanding of RelBench and our initial benchmarking results. If you just want to quickly familiarize with the data and tasks, the website is a better place to start.

Position Paper (ICML 2024) [Relational Deep Learning: Graph Representation Learning on Relational Databases.]

This paper outlines our proposal for how to do end-to-end deep learning on relational databases by combining graph neural networsk with deep tabular models. We reccomend reading this paper if you want to think about new methods for end-to-end deep learning on relational databases. The paper includes a section on possible directions for future research to give a snapshot of some of the research possilibities there are in this area.

Design of RelBench

RelBench has the following main components:

1. 7 databases with a total of 30 tasks; both of these automatically downloadable for ease of use
2. Easy data loading, and graph construction from pkey-fkey links
3. Your own model, which can use any deep learning stack since RelBench is framework-agnostic. We provide a first model implementation using PyTorch Geometric and PyTorch Frame.
4. Standardized evaluators - all you need to do is produce a list of predictions for test samples, and RelBench computes metrics to ensure standardized evaluation
5. A leaderboard you can upload your results to, to track SOTA progress.

Installation

You can install RelBench using pip:

pip install relbench

This will allow usage of the core RelBench data and task loading functionality.

To additionally use relbench.modeling, which requires PyTorch, PyTorch Geometric and PyTorch Frame, install these dependencies manually or do:

pip install relbench[full]

For the scripts in the examples directory, use:

pip install relbench[example]

Then, to run a script:

git clone https://github.com/snap-stanford/relbench
cd relbench/examples
python gnn_node.py --dataset rel-f1 --task driver-position

Package Usage

This section provides a brief overview of using the RelBench package. For a more in-depth coverage see the Tutorials section. For detailed documentations, please see the code directly.

Imports:

from relbench.base import Table, Database, Dataset, NodeTask
from relbench.datasets import get_dataset
from relbench.tasks import get_task

Get a dataset, e.g., rel-amazon:

dataset: Dataset = get_dataset("rel-amazon", download=True)

Details on downloading and caching behavior.

RelBench datasets (and tasks) are cached to disk (usually at ~/.cache/relbench). If not present in cache, download=True downloads the data, verifies it against the known hash, and caches it. If present, download=True performs the verification and avoids downloading if verification succeeds. This is the recommended way.

download=False uses the cached data without verification, if present, or processes and caches the data from scratch / raw sources otherwise.

dataset consists of a Database object and temporal splitting times dataset.val_timestamp and dataset.test_timestamp.

To get the database:

db: Database = dataset.get_db()

Preventing temporal leakage

By default, rows with timestamp > dataset.test_timestamp are excluded to prevent accidental temporal leakage. The full database can be obtained with:

full_db: Database = dataset.get_db(upto_test_timestamp=False)

Various tasks can be defined on a dataset. For example, to get the user-churn task for rel-amazon:

task: NodeTask = get_task("rel-amazon", "user-churn", download=True)

A task provides train/val/test tables:

train_table: Table = task.get_table("train")
val_table: Table = task.get_table("val")
test_table: Table = task.get_table("test")

Preventing test leakage

By default, the target labels are hidden from the test table to prevent accidental data leakage. The full test table can be obtained with:

full_test_table: Table = task.get_table("test", mask_input_cols=False)

You can build your model on top of the database and the task tables. After training and validation, you can make prediction from your model on the test table. Suppose your prediction test_pred is a NumPy array following the order of task.test_table, you can call the following to get the evaluation metrics:

task.evaluate(test_pred)

Additionally, you can evaluate validation (or training) predictions as such:

task.evaluate(val_pred, val_table)

Tutorials

To get started with RelBench, we provide some helpful Colab notebook tutorials. These tutorials cover (i) how to load data using RelBench, focusing on providing users with the understanding of RelBench data logic needed to use RelBench data freely with any desired ML models, and (ii) training a GNN predictive model to solve tasks in RelBench. Please refer to the code for more detailed documentation.

Name	Notebook	Try on Colab	Description
Loading Data	load_data.ipynb		How to load and explore RelBench data
Training models	train_model.ipynb		Train your first GNN-based model on RelBench.

Cite RelBench

If you use RelBench in your work, please cite our position and benchmark papers:

@inproceedings{rdl,
  title={Position: Relational Deep Learning - Graph Representation Learning on Relational Databases},
  author={Fey, Matthias and Hu, Weihua and Huang, Kexin and Lenssen, Jan Eric and Ranjan, Rishabh and Robinson, Joshua and Ying, Rex and You, Jiaxuan and Leskovec, Jure},
  booktitle={Forty-first International Conference on Machine Learning}
}

[TODO: update with arxiv citation]

@article{relbench,
  title={RelBench: A Benchmark for Deep Learning on Relational Databases},
  author={Joshua Robinson, Rishabh Ranjan, Weihua Hu, Kexin Huang, Jiaqi Han, Alejandro Dobles, Matthias Fey, Jan Eric Lenssen, Yiwen Yuan, Zecheng Zhang, Xinwei He, Jure Leskovec},
  year={2024}
}