LATTE: Application Oriented Social Network Embedding

In recent years, many research works propose to embed the network structured data into a low-dimensional feature space, where each node is represented as a feature vector. However, due to the detachment of embedding process with external tasks, the learned embedding results by most existing embedding models can be ineffective for application tasks with specific objectives, e.g., community detection or information diffusion. In this paper, we propose study the application oriented heterogeneous social network embedding problem. Significantly different from the existing works, besides the network structure preservation, the problem should also incorporate the objectives of external applications in the objective function. To resolve the problem, in this paper, we propose a novel network embedding framework, namely the "appLicAtion orienTed neTwork Embedding" (Latte) model. In Latte, the heterogeneous network structure can be applied to compute the node "diffusive proximity" scores, which capture both local and global network structures. Based on these computed scores, Latte learns the network representation feature vectors by extending the autoencoder model model to the heterogeneous network scenario, which can also effectively unite the objectives of network embedding and external application tasks. Extensive experiments have been done on real-world heterogeneous social network datasets, and the experimental results have demonstrated the outstanding performance of Latte in learning the representation vectors for specific application tasks.Comment: 11 Pages, 12 Figures, 1 Tabl

DeepInf: Social Influence Prediction with Deep Learning

Social and information networking activities such as on Facebook, Twitter, WeChat, and Weibo have become an indispensable part of our everyday life, where we can easily access friends' behaviors and are in turn influenced by them. Consequently, an effective social influence prediction for each user is critical for a variety of applications such as online recommendation and advertising. Conventional social influence prediction approaches typically design various hand-crafted rules to extract user- and network-specific features. However, their effectiveness heavily relies on the knowledge of domain experts. As a result, it is usually difficult to generalize them into different domains. Inspired by the recent success of deep neural networks in a wide range of computing applications, we design an end-to-end framework, DeepInf, to learn users' latent feature representation for predicting social influence. In general, DeepInf takes a user's local network as the input to a graph neural network for learning her latent social representation. We design strategies to incorporate both network structures and user-specific features into convolutional neural and attention networks. Extensive experiments on Open Academic Graph, Twitter, Weibo, and Digg, representing different types of social and information networks, demonstrate that the proposed end-to-end model, DeepInf, significantly outperforms traditional feature engineering-based approaches, suggesting the effectiveness of representation learning for social applications.Comment: 10 pages, 5 figures, to appear in KDD 2018 proceeding