Beyond Node Embedding: A Direct Unsupervised Edge Representation Framework for Homogeneous Networks

Network representation learning has traditionally been used to find lower dimensional vector representations of the nodes in a network. However, there are very important edge driven mining tasks of interest to the classical network analysis community, which have mostly been unexplored in the network embedding space. For applications such as link prediction in homogeneous networks, vector representation (i.e., embedding) of an edge is derived heuristically just by using simple aggregations of the embeddings of the end vertices of the edge. Clearly, this method of deriving edge embedding is suboptimal and there is a need for a dedicated unsupervised approach for embedding edges by leveraging edge properties of the network. Towards this end, we propose a novel concept of converting a network to its weighted line graph which is ideally suited to find the embedding of edges of the original network. We further derive a novel algorithm to embed the line graph, by introducing the concept of collective homophily. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first direct unsupervised approach for edge embedding in homogeneous information networks, without relying on the node embeddings. We validate the edge embeddings on three downstream edge mining tasks. Our proposed optimization framework for edge embedding also generates a set of node embeddings, which are not just the aggregation of edges. Further experimental analysis shows the connection of our framework to the concept of node centrality.

Outlier Aware Network Embedding for Attributed Networks

Attributed network embedding has received much interest from the research community as most of the networks come with some content in each node, which is also known as node attributes. Existing attributed network approaches work well when the network is consistent in structure and attributes, and nodes behave as expected. But real world networks often have anomalous nodes. Typically these outliers, being relatively unexplainable, affect the embeddings of other nodes in the network. Thus all the downstream network mining tasks fail miserably in the presence of such outliers. Hence an integrated approach to detect anomalies and reduce their overall effect on the network embedding is required. Towards this end, we propose an unsupervised outlier aware network embedding algorithm (ONE) for attributed networks, which minimizes the effect of the outlier nodes, and hence generates robust network embeddings. We align and jointly optimize the loss functions coming from structure and attributes of the network. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first generic network embedding approach which incorporates the effect of outliers for an attributed network without any supervision. We experimented on publicly available real networks and manually planted different types of outliers to check the performance of the proposed algorithm. Results demonstrate the superiority of our approach to detect the network outliers compared to the state-of-the-art approaches. We also consider different downstream machine learning applications on networks to show the efficiency of ONE as a generic network embedding technique. The source code is made available at https://github.com/sambaranban/ONE.