DDEC: Dual Dependency-Enhanced Contrastive Learning for Sparse Hypergraph Node Classification

Hypergraph neural networks have shown strong potential for node classification due to their ability to capture high-order relationships and multi-granularity structural patterns. However, real-world hypergraphs are often sparse, which limits interaction modeling through node–hyperedge incidence and, in turn, weakens reliable attribute propagation and global dependency capture. To address this issue, we propose DDEC, a Dual Dependency-Enhanced Contrastive learning framework for sparse hypergraph node classification. To compensate for relational information lost under sparse structures, DDEC introduces an attribute view to complement the structural view. Since attribute information can be noisy and unreliable, we first design an entropy-guided feature recalibration mechanism to estimate node uncertainty and emphasize trustworthy attribute interactions. Building upon this, DDEC performs dual dependency enhancement from both structural and attribute perspectives. Specifically, we exploit the duality between a hypergraph and its line graph to perform line-graph transformation in both views, thereby constructing a shared dual relational space for interaction enhancement under sparse topologies. Within this dual space, we perform attention-based dependency enhancement in both views, so that the structural view captures explicit topological dependencies among hyperedges, while the attribute view uncovers latent semantic correlations beyond sparse incidence relations. The resulting representations from the two views are then adaptively fused, and collaborative contrastive learning is further performed at both the node and hyperedge levels to enforce multi-granularity semantic consistency. Experiments on eight public datasets demonstrate that DDEC consistently outperforms competitive baselines, validating its effectiveness and robustness.