Network Representation Learning: A Survey

With the widespread use of information technologies, information networks are becoming increasingly popular to capture complex relationships across various disciplines, such as social networks, citation networks, telecommunication networks, and biological networks. Analyzing these networks sheds light on different aspects of social life such as the structure of societies, information diffusion, and communication patterns. In reality, however, the large scale of information networks often makes network analytic tasks computationally expensive or intractable. Network representation learning has been recently proposed as a new learning paradigm to embed network vertices into a low-dimensional vector space, by preserving network topology structure, vertex content, and other side information. This facilitates the original network to be easily handled in the new vector space for further analysis. In this survey, we perform a comprehensive review of the current literature on network representation learning in the data mining and machine learning field. We propose new taxonomies to categorize and summarize the state-of-the-art network representation learning techniques according to the underlying learning mechanisms, the network information intended to preserve, as well as the algorithmic designs and methodologies. We summarize evaluation protocols used for validating network representation learning including published benchmark datasets, evaluation methods, and open source algorithms. We also perform empirical studies to compare the performance of representative algorithms on common datasets, and analyze their computational complexity. Finally, we suggest promising research directions to facilitate future study.Comment: Accepted by IEEE transactions on Big Data; 25 pages, 10 tables, 6 figures and 127 reference

Attributed Network Embedding for Learning in a Dynamic Environment

Network embedding leverages the node proximity manifested to learn a low-dimensional node vector representation for each node in the network. The learned embeddings could advance various learning tasks such as node classification, network clustering, and link prediction. Most, if not all, of the existing works, are overwhelmingly performed in the context of plain and static networks. Nonetheless, in reality, network structure often evolves over time with addition/deletion of links and nodes. Also, a vast majority of real-world networks are associated with a rich set of node attributes, and their attribute values are also naturally changing, with the emerging of new content patterns and the fading of old content patterns. These changing characteristics motivate us to seek an effective embedding representation to capture network and attribute evolving patterns, which is of fundamental importance for learning in a dynamic environment. To our best knowledge, we are the first to tackle this problem with the following two challenges: (1) the inherently correlated network and node attributes could be noisy and incomplete, it necessitates a robust consensus representation to capture their individual properties and correlations; (2) the embedding learning needs to be performed in an online fashion to adapt to the changes accordingly. In this paper, we tackle this problem by proposing a novel dynamic attributed network embedding framework - DANE. In particular, DANE first provides an offline method for a consensus embedding and then leverages matrix perturbation theory to maintain the freshness of the end embedding results in an online manner. We perform extensive experiments on both synthetic and real attributed networks to corroborate the effectiveness and efficiency of the proposed framework.Comment: 10 page

Transforming Graph Representations for Statistical Relational Learning

Relational data representations have become an increasingly important topic due to the recent proliferation of network datasets (e.g., social, biological, information networks) and a corresponding increase in the application of statistical relational learning (SRL) algorithms to these domains. In this article, we examine a range of representation issues for graph-based relational data. Since the choice of relational data representation for the nodes, links, and features can dramatically affect the capabilities of SRL algorithms, we survey approaches and opportunities for relational representation transformation designed to improve the performance of these algorithms. This leads us to introduce an intuitive taxonomy for data representation transformations in relational domains that incorporates link transformation and node transformation as symmetric representation tasks. In particular, the transformation tasks for both nodes and links include (i) predicting their existence, (ii) predicting their label or type, (iii) estimating their weight or importance, and (iv) systematically constructing their relevant features. We motivate our taxonomy through detailed examples and use it to survey and compare competing approaches for each of these tasks. We also discuss general conditions for transforming links, nodes, and features. Finally, we highlight challenges that remain to be addressed

Search Efficient Binary Network Embedding

Traditional network embedding primarily focuses on learning a dense vector representation for each node, which encodes network structure and/or node content information, such that off-the-shelf machine learning algorithms can be easily applied to the vector-format node representations for network analysis. However, the learned dense vector representations are inefficient for large-scale similarity search, which requires to find the nearest neighbor measured by Euclidean distance in a continuous vector space. In this paper, we propose a search efficient binary network embedding algorithm called BinaryNE to learn a sparse binary code for each node, by simultaneously modeling node context relations and node attribute relations through a three-layer neural network. BinaryNE learns binary node representations efficiently through a stochastic gradient descent based online learning algorithm. The learned binary encoding not only reduces memory usage to represent each node, but also allows fast bit-wise comparisons to support much quicker network node search compared to Euclidean distance or other distance measures. Our experiments and comparisons show that BinaryNE not only delivers more than 23 times faster search speed, but also provides comparable or better search quality than traditional continuous vector based network embedding methods

Weakly supervised collective feature learning from curated media

The current state-of-the-art in feature learning relies on the supervised learning of large-scale datasets consisting of target content items and their respective category labels. However, constructing such large-scale fully-labeled datasets generally requires painstaking manual effort. One possible solution to this problem is to employ community contributed text tags as weak labels, however, the concepts underlying a single text tag strongly depends on the users. We instead present a new paradigm for learning discriminative features by making full use of the human curation process on social networking services (SNSs). During the process of content curation, SNS users collect content items manually from various sources and group them by context, all for their own benefit. Due to the nature of this process, we can assume that (1) content items in the same group share the same semantic concept and (2) groups sharing the same images might have related semantic concepts. Through these insights, we can define human curated groups as weak labels from which our proposed framework can learn discriminative features as a representation in the space of semantic concepts the users intended when creating the groups. We show that this feature learning can be formulated as a problem of link prediction for a bipartite graph whose nodes corresponds to content items and human curated groups, and propose a novel method for feature learning based on sparse coding or network fine-tuning

Learning with Graphs using Kernels from Propagated Information

Traditional machine learning approaches are designed to learn from independent vector-valued data points. The assumption that instances are independent, however, is not always true. On the contrary, there are numerous domains where data points are cross-linked, for example social networks, where persons are linked by friendship relations. These relations among data points make traditional machine learning diffcult and often insuffcient. Furthermore, data points themselves can have complex structure, for example molecules or proteins constructed from various bindings of different atoms. Networked and structured data are naturally represented by graphs, and for learning we aimto exploit their structure to improve upon non-graph-based methods. However, graphs encountered in real-world applications often come with rich additional information. This naturally implies many challenges for representation and learning: node information is likely to be incomplete leading to partially labeled graphs, information can be aggregated from multiple sources and can therefore be uncertain, or additional information on nodes and edges can be derived from complex sensor measurements, thus being naturally continuous. Although learning with graphs is an active research area, learning with structured data, substantially modeling structural similarities of graphs, mostly assumes fully labeled graphs of reasonable sizes with discrete and certain node and edge information, and learning with networked data, naturally dealing with missing information and huge graphs, mostly assumes homophily and forgets about structural similarity. To close these gaps, we present a novel paradigm for learning with graphs, that exploits the intermediate results of iterative information propagation schemes on graphs. Originally developed for within-network relational and semi-supervised learning, these propagation schemes have two desirable properties: they capture structural information and they can naturally adapt to the aforementioned issues of real-world graph data. Additionally, information propagation can be efficiently realized by random walks leading to fast, flexible, and scalable feature and kernel computations. Further, by considering intermediate random walk distributions, we can model structural similarity for learning with structured and networked data. We develop several approaches based on this paradigm. In particular, we introduce propagation kernels for learning on the graph level and coinciding walk kernels and Markov logic sets for learning on the node level. Finally, we present two application domains where kernels from propagated information successfully tackle real-world problems