Flexible Attributed Network Embedding

TL;DR

FANE is a novel network embedding framework that effectively combines structure and property information, leading to improved classification accuracy and better exploration of network properties.

Contribution

The paper introduces FANE, a new framework that unifies structure and property information in network embedding using a novel random walk strategy.

Findings

Over 5% improvement on Cora dataset classification

More than 10% improvement on WebKB dataset classification

Enhanced visualization for network property exploration

Abstract

Network embedding aims to find a way to encode network by learning an embedding vector for each node in the network. The network often has property information which is highly informative with respect to the node's position and role in the network. Most network embedding methods fail to utilize this information during network representation learning. In this paper, we propose a novel framework, FANE, to integrate structure and property information in the network embedding process. In FANE, we design a network to unify heterogeneity of the two information sources, and define a new random walking strategy to leverage property information and make the two information compensate. FANE is conceptually simple and empirically powerful. It improves over the state-of-the-art methods on Cora dataset classification task by over 5%, more than 10% on WebKB dataset classification task. Experiments also show that the results improve more than the state-of-the-art methods as increasing training size. Moreover, qualitative visualization show that our framework is helpful in network property information exploration. In all, we present a new way for efficiently learning state-of-the-art task-independent representations in complex attributed networks. The source code and datasets of this paper can be obtained from https://github.com/GraphWorld/FANE.