Multimodal Network Alignment

TL;DR

This paper introduces a novel method for aligning multimodal networks by directly computing a low-rank matrix factorization, enabling efficient approximate maximum weight matchings, demonstrated on synthetic and real transportation networks.

Contribution

It presents a new low-rank factorization approach for multimodal network alignment and methods for approximate maximum weight matchings, advancing network analysis techniques.

Findings

Effective on synthetic networks

Successfully de-anonymized transportation network

Outperforms existing alignment methods

Abstract

A multimodal network encodes relationships between the same set of nodes in multiple settings, and network alignment is a powerful tool for transferring information and insight between a pair of networks. We propose a method for multimodal network alignment that computes a matrix which indicates the alignment, but produces the result as a low-rank factorization directly. We then propose new methods to compute approximate maximum weight matchings of low-rank matrices to produce an alignment. We evaluate our approach by applying it on synthetic networks and use it to de-anonymize a multimodal transportation network.