Network representation learning systematic review: ancestors and current development state

TL;DR

This paper provides a comprehensive systematic review of network representation learning, covering its history, development, models, evaluation methods, datasets, and open-source tools, highlighting its evolution from traditional graph embedding to current advanced techniques.

Contribution

It offers the first extensive survey tracing the evolution, key concepts, models, and evaluation practices in network representation learning, serving as a foundational reference.

Findings

Historical overview of representation learning and word embedding origins

Classification of network embedding models and pipeline components

Summary of evaluation metrics, datasets, and open-source libraries

Abstract

Real-world information networks are increasingly occurring across various disciplines including online social networks and citation networks. These network data are generally characterized by sparseness, nonlinearity and heterogeneity bringing different challenges to the network analytics task to capture inherent properties from network data. Artificial intelligence and machine learning have been recently leveraged as powerful systems to learn insights from network data and deal with presented challenges. As part of machine learning techniques, graph embedding approaches are originally conceived for graphs constructed from feature represented datasets, like image dataset, in which links between nodes are explicitly defined. These traditional approaches cannot cope with network data challenges. As a new learning paradigm, network representation learning has been proposed to map a real-world information network into a low-dimensional space while preserving inherent properties of the network. In this paper, we present a systematic comprehensive survey of network representation learning, known also as network embedding, from birth to the current development state. Through the undertaken survey, we provide a comprehensive view of reasons behind the emergence of network embedding and, types of settings and models used in the network embedding pipeline. Thus, we introduce a brief history of representation learning and word representation learning ancestor of network embedding. We provide also formal definitions of basic concepts required to understand network representation learning followed by a description of network embedding pipeline. Most commonly used downstream tasks to evaluate embeddings, their evaluation metrics and popular datasets are highlighted. Finally, we present the open-source libraries for network embedding.