BL-MNE: Emerging Heterogeneous Social Network Embedding through Broad Learning with Aligned Autoencoder

TL;DR

This paper introduces DIME, a novel deep autoencoder framework that leverages aligned mature networks to improve embedding quality for emerging, sparse, heterogeneous social networks, enhancing their utility for downstream tasks.

Contribution

The paper proposes a new broad learning-based autoencoder method, DIME, that effectively integrates multiple aligned networks and heterogeneous data for better embedding of emerging social networks.

Findings

DIME outperforms existing methods in embedding quality on real-world aligned social networks.

The approach effectively handles diverse link types and attributes in heterogeneous networks.

Experimental results demonstrate improved performance in downstream tasks like node classification.

Abstract

Network embedding aims at projecting the network data into a low-dimensional feature space, where the nodes are represented as a unique feature vector and network structure can be effectively preserved. In recent years, more and more online application service sites can be represented as massive and complex networks, which are extremely challenging for traditional machine learning algorithms to deal with. Effective embedding of the complex network data into low-dimension feature representation can both save data storage space and enable traditional machine learning algorithms applicable to handle the network data. Network embedding performance will degrade greatly if the networks are of a sparse structure, like the emerging networks with few connections. In this paper, we propose to learn the embedding representation for a target emerging network based on the broad learning setting, where the emerging network is aligned with other external mature networks at the same time. To solve the problem, a new embedding framework, namely "Deep alIgned autoencoder based eMbEdding" (DIME), is introduced in this paper. DIME handles the diverse link and attribute in a unified analytic based on broad learning, and introduces the multiple aligned attributed heterogeneous social network concept to model the network structure. A set of meta paths are introduced in the paper, which define various kinds of connections among users via the heterogeneous link and attribute information. The closeness among users in the networks are defined as the meta proximity scores, which will be fed into DIME to learn the embedding vectors of users in the emerging network. Extensive experiments have been done on real-world aligned social networks, which have demonstrated the effectiveness of DIME in learning the emerging network embedding vectors.