Same code vastly different accuracies

Question

I am working on a node classification model, My friend implemented a simple 2 layer GCN and got an accuracy of 62%, I implemented the same code and got an accuracy of 50% we are both working on google collab, anyone knows why this is happening.

Answer 1

Are you working on the same dataset?

If yes - Somewhere in the code, there could be some parameter that is initialized randomly, usually called the random seed. This is why you are getting different answers.

Answer 2

Apart from what @Rina said, another possibility could be that the algorithm runs with parallelization, and thus sometimes it is not guaranteed that all threads will finish at the correct order etc. Although this would not affect the result all that much in my experience, but it can explain some variance.