A method for employing a differentiable ranking based graph sparsification (DRGS) network to use supervision signals from downstream tasks to guide graph sparsification is presented. The method includes, in a training phase, generating node representations by neighborhood aggregation operators, generating sparsified subgraphs by top-k neighbor sampling from a learned neighborhood ranking distribution, feeding the sparsified subgraphs to a task, generating a prediction, and collecting a prediction error to update parameters in the generating and feeding steps to minimize an error, and, in a testing phase, generating node representations by neighborhood aggregation operators related to testing data, generating sparsified subgraphs by top-k neighbor sampling from a learned neighborhood ranking distribution related to the testing data, feeding the sparsified subgraphs related to the testing data to a task, and outputting prediction results to a visualization device.