Network representation learning

In the last few years, thanks to the efforts of two PhDs under my super­vi­sion, Zekarias Kefato and Nasrullah Sheikh, I star­ted to explo­re pro­blems that are com­ple­te­ly outsi­de the distri­bu­ted systems topic: name­ly, machi­ne lear­ning with a par­ti­cu­lar focus on net­work repre­sen­ta­tion lear­ning. Maybe it is the aca­de­mic age, but when I say “I star­ted to explo­re” real­ly means Zekarias and Nasrullah were doing 95% of the work, and my role has been just to make sure that the papers are easy to read.

Network Representation Learning is a method to learn a low-dimen­sio­nal embed­ding of a gra­ph such that its geo­me­tri­cal pro­per­ties are pre­ser­ved. The lear­ned embed­dings are used in various down­stream machi­ne lear­ning tasks such as clas­si­fi­ca­tion and link prediction. 

NRL can be per­for­med by using various sour­ces of infor­ma­tion in a gra­ph such as net­work struc­tu­re, attri­bu­tes, and casca­des. These sour­ces can be used inde­pen­den­tly or in com­bi­na­tion, depen­ding on their avai­la­bi­li­ty. Early research focu­sed on using only struc­tu­ral infor­ma­tion due to its default avai­la­bi­li­ty. Recent resul­ts sug­ge­st that using addi­tio­nal infor­ma­tion may help in lear­ning a bet­ter repre­sen­ta­tion. The chal­len­ge is how to incor­po­ra­te dif­fe­rent sour­ces of infor­ma­tion in the lear­ning process. 

Towards this end, we wor­ked on two directions: 

  1. Network repre­sen­ta­tion lear­ning on attri­bu­ted gra­phs and hete­ro­ge­neous gra­phs. GAT2VEC [Computing19] learns a repre­sen­ta­tion of nodes from struc­tu­ral con­text and attri­bu­te con­text obtai­ned from struc­tu­ral and attri­bu­te infor­ma­tion respec­ti­ve­ly. The HETNET2VEC [SNAMS18b] model is for hete­ro­ge­nous net­work repre­sen­ta­tion lear­ning. The model pre­ser­ves the various seman­tic rela­tion­ship among nodes to learn a representation. 
  2. Using casca­de infor­ma­tion for net­work repre­sen­ta­tion lear­ning [MLG17] [MLG17][LOD18] and vira­li­ty pre­dic­tion [SNAMS18a]. In the case of social net­works, the under­ly­ing net­work infor­ma­tion may not be avai­la­ble due to pro­vi­der restric­tions, but we can obser­ve the dif­fu­sion even­ts which are signals of the under­ly­ing net­works. Using casca­des we can use reco­ver the under­ly­ing net­work throu­gh net­work repre­sen­ta­tion learning.

Additional resul­ts have been obtai­ned in the  field of influen­cer detec­tion [MAISON17], net­work inference/link pre­dic­tion  [MOD17]

[MAISON17]   Zekarias T. Kefato and Alberto Montresor. Personalized influen­cer detec­tion: Topic and expo­su­re-con­for­mi­ty aware. In Proc. of the International Workshop on Mining Actionable Insights from Social Networks, MAISoN’17. ACM, February 2017. [PDF], [Bibtex].

[MLG17]   Zekarias T. Kefato, Nasrullah Sheikh, and Alberto Montresor. Deepinfer: Diffusion net­work infe­ren­ce throu­gh repre­sen­ta­tion lear­ning. In Proc. of the 13th International Workshop on Mining and Learning With Graphs, MLG’17. ACM, August 2017. [PDF], [Bibtex].

[MOD17]   Zekarias T. Kefato, Nasrullah Sheikh, and Alberto Montresor. Mineral: Multi-modal net­work repre­sen­ta­tion lear­ning. In Proc. of the 3rd International Conference on Machine Learning, Optimization and Big Data, MOD’17. ACM, September 2017. [PDF], [Bibtex].

[Computing19]   Nasrullah Sheikh, Zekarias Kefato, and Alberto Montresor. GAT2VEC: Representation lear­ning for attri­bu­ted gra­phs. Computing, 2018. [PDF], [Bibtex].

[LOD18]   Zekarias T. Kefato, Nasrullah Sheikh, and Alberto Montresor. REFINE: Representation lear­ning from dif­fu­sion even­ts. In Proc. of the 4th Conference on Machine Learning, Optimization and Data scien­ce, LOD’18. Springer, September 2018. [PDF], [Bibtex].

[SNAMS18a]   Zekarias T. Kefato, Nasrullah Sheikh, Leila Bahri, Amira Soliman, Alberto Montresor, and Sarunas Girdzijauskas. CAS2VEC: net­work-agno­stic casca­de pre­dic­tion in onli­ne social net­works. In Proc. of the 5th International Conferenceon Social Networks Analysis, Management and Security (SNAMS 2018), pages 72–79. IEEE, October 2018. [PDF], [Bibtex].

[SNAMS18b]   Nasrullah Sheikh, Zekarias T. Kefato, and Alberto Montresor. Semi-super­vi­sed hete­ro­ge­neous infor­ma­tion net­work embed­ding for node clas­si­fi­ca­tion using 1D-CNN. In Proc. of the 5th International Conference on Social Networks Analysis, Management and Security (SNAMS 2018), pages 177–181. IEEE, October 2018. [PDF], [Bibtex].

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