Link Prediction in Heterogeneous Information Networks: Improved Hypergraph Convolution with Adaptive Soft Voting

TL;DR

This paper introduces a new method for predicting links in complex networks by combining hypergraph convolution with an adaptive voting strategy, improving accuracy over existing techniques.

Contribution

The novel VE-HGCN model integrates hypergraph convolution with a soft-voting ensemble to better capture high-order structures in heterogeneous networks.

Findings

VE-HGCN outperforms seven baseline models on four public HIN datasets.

The method effectively captures high-order structures while reducing redundant noise.

The model shows good generality and practicality for complex network analysis.

Abstract

Complex real-world systems are often modeled as heterogeneous information networks with diverse node and relation types, bringing new opportunities and challenges to link prediction. Traditional methods based on similarity or meta-paths fail to fully capture high-order structures and semantics, while existing hypergraph-based models homogenize all high-order information without considering their importance differences, diluting core associations with redundant noise and limiting prediction accuracy. Given these issues, we propose the VE-HGCN, a link prediction model for HINs that fuses hypergraph convolution with soft-voting ensemble strategy. The model first constructs multiple heterogeneous hypergraphs from HINs via network frequent subgraph pattern extraction, then leverages hypergraph convolution for node representation learning, and finally employs a soft-voting ensemble strategy to fuse multi-model prediction results. Extensive experiments on four public HIN datasets show that the VE-HGCN outperforms seven mainstream baseline models, thereby validating the effectiveness of the proposed method. This study offers a new perspective for link prediction in HINs and exhibits good generality and practicality, providing a feasible reference for addressing high-order information utilization issues in complex heterogeneous network analysis.

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