Unsupervised Learning via Network-Aware Embeddings

TL;DR

This paper introduces a novel method for creating network-aware embeddings of node attributes to improve clustering in complex, interconnected data, demonstrating benefits across various real-world applications.

Contribution

It proposes a new approach that generates network-aware embeddings of node attributes, addressing a gap in existing clustering methods by explicitly incorporating network structure.

Findings

Network embeddings improve clustering performance.

Method scales to large networks.

Provides actionable insights in diverse fields.

Abstract

Data clustering, the task of grouping observations according to their similarity, is a key component of unsupervised learning -- with real world applications in diverse fields such as biology, medicine, and social science. Often in these fields the data comes with complex interdependencies between the dimensions of analysis, for instance the various characteristics and opinions people can have live on a complex social network. Current clustering methods are ill-suited to tackle this complexity: deep learning can approximate these dependencies, but not take their explicit map as the input of the analysis. In this paper, we aim at fixing this blind spot in the unsupervised learning literature. We can create network-aware embeddings by estimating the network distance between numeric node attributes via the generalized Euclidean distance. Differently from all methods in the literature that we know of, we do not cluster the nodes of the network, but rather its node attributes. In our experiments we show that having these network embeddings is always beneficial for the learning task; that our method scales to large networks; and that we can actually provide actionable insights in applications in a variety of fields such as marketing, economics, and political science. Our method is fully open source and data and code are available to reproduce all results in the paper.