No Arabic abstract
Node representation learning for signed directed networks has received considerable attention in many real-world applications such as link sign prediction, node classification and node recommendation. The challenge lies in how to adequately encode the complex topological information of the networks. Recent studies mainly focus on preserving the first-order network topology which indicates the closeness relationships of nodes. However, these methods generally fail to capture the high-order topology which indicates the local structures of nodes and serves as an essential characteristic of the network topology. In addition, for the first-order topology, the additional value of non-existent links is largely ignored. In this paper, we propose to learn more representative node embeddings by simultaneously capturing the first-order and high-order topology in signed directed networks. In particular, we reformulate the representation learning problem on signed directed networks from a variational auto-encoding perspective and further develop a decoupled variational embedding (DVE) method. DVE leverages a specially designed auto-encoder structure to capture both the first-order and high-order topology of signed directed networks, and thus learns more representative node embedding. Extensive experiments are conducted on three widely used real-world datasets. Comprehensive results on both link sign prediction and node recommendation task demonstrate the effectiveness of DVE. Qualitative results and analysis are also given to provide a better understanding of DVE.
Signed networks are mathematical structures that encode positive and negative relations between entities such as friend/foe or trust/distrust. Recently, several papers studied the construction of useful low-dimensional representations (embeddings) of these networks for the prediction of missing relations or signs. Existing embedding methods for sign prediction generally enforce different notions of status or balance theories in their optimization function. These theories, however, are often inaccurate or incomplete, which negatively impacts method performance. In this context, we introduce conditional signed network embedding (CSNE). Our probabilistic approach models structural information about the signs in the network separately from fine-grained detail. Structural information is represented in the form of a prior, while the embedding itself is used for capturing fine-grained information. These components are then integrated in a rigorous manner. CSNEs accuracy depends on the existence of sufficiently powerful structural priors for modelling signed networks, currently unavailable in the literature. Thus, as a second main contribution, which we find to be highly valuable in its own right, we also introduce a novel approach to construct priors based on the Maximum Entropy (MaxEnt) principle. These priors can model the emph{polarity} of nodes (degree to which their links are positive) as well as signed emph{triangle counts} (a measure of the degree structural balance holds to in a network). Experiments on a variety of real-world networks confirm that CSNE outperforms the state-of-the-art on the task of sign prediction. Moreover, the MaxEnt priors on their own, while less accurate than full CSNE, achieve accuracies competitive with the state-of-the-art at very limited computational cost, thus providing an excellent runtime-accuracy trade-off in resource-constrained situations.
Network embedding is aimed at mapping nodes in a network into low-dimensional vector representations. Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have received widespread attention and lead to state-of-the-art performance in learning node representations. However, most GNNs only work in unsigned networks, where only positive links exist. It is not trivial to transfer these models to signed directed networks, which are widely observed in the real world yet less studied. In this paper, we first review two fundamental sociological theories (i.e., status theory and balance theory) and conduct empirical studies on real-world datasets to analyze the social mechanism in signed directed networks. Guided by related sociological theories, we propose a novel Signed Directed Graph Neural Networks model named SDGNN to learn node embeddings for signed directed networks. The proposed model simultaneously reconstructs link signs, link directions, and signed directed triangles. We validate our models effectiveness on five real-world datasets, which are commonly used as the benchmark for signed network embedding. Experiments demonstrate the proposed model outperforms existing models, including feature-based methods, network embedding methods, and several GNN methods.
Signed network embedding is an approach to learn low-dimensional representations of nodes in signed networks with both positive and negative links, which facilitates downstream tasks such as link prediction with general data mining frameworks. Due to the distinct properties and significant added value of negative links, existing signed network embedding methods usually design dedicated methods based on social theories such as balance theory and status theory. However, existing signed network embedding methods ignore the characteristics of multiple facets of each node and mix them up in one single representation, which limits the ability to capture the fine-grained attentions between node pairs. In this paper, we propose MUSE, a MUlti-faceted attention-based Signed network Embedding framework to tackle this problem. Specifically, a joint intra- and inter-facet attention mechanism is introduced to aggregate fine-grained information from neighbor nodes. Moreover, balance theory is also utilized to guide information aggregation from multi-order balanced and unbalanced neighbors. Experimental results on four real-world signed network datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed framework.
Node representation learning for directed graphs is critically important to facilitate many graph mining tasks. To capture the directed edges between nodes, existing methods mostly learn two embedding vectors for each node, source vector and target vector. However, these methods learn the source and target vectors separately. For the node with very low indegree or outdegree, the corresponding target vector or source vector cannot be effectively learned. In this paper, we propose a novel Directed Graph embedding framework based on Generative Adversarial Network, called DGGAN. The main idea is to use adversarial mechanisms to deploy a discriminator and two generators that jointly learn each nodes source and target vectors. For a given node, the two generators are trained to generate its fake target and source neighbor nodes from the same underlying distribution, and the discriminator aims to distinguish whether a neighbor node is real or fake. The two generators are formulated into a unified framework and could mutually reinforce each other to learn more robust source and target vectors. Extensive experiments show that DGGAN consistently and significantly outperforms existing state-of-the-art methods across multiple graph mining tasks on directed graphs.
A weighted directed network (WDN) is a directed graph in which each edge is associated to a unique value called weight. These networks are very suitable for modeling real-world social networks in which there is an assessment of one vertex toward other vertices. One of the main problems studied in this paper is prediction of edge weights in such networks. We introduce, for the first time, a metric geometry approach to studying edge weight prediction in WDNs. We modify a usual notion of WDNs, and introduce a new type of WDNs which we coin the term textit{almost-weighted directed networks} (AWDNs). AWDNs can capture the weight information of a network from a given training set. We then construct a class of metrics (or distances) for AWDNs which equips such networks with a metric space structure. Using the metric geometry structure of AWDNs, we propose modified $k$ nearest neighbors (kNN) methods and modified support-vector machine (SVM) methods which will then be used to predict edge weights in AWDNs. In many real-world datasets, in addition to edge weights, one can also associate weights to vertices which capture information of vertices; association of weights to vertices especially plays an important role in graph embedding problems. Adopting a similar approach, we introduce two new types of directed networks in which weights are associated to either a subset of origin vertices or a subset of terminal vertices . We, for the first time, construct novel classes of metrics on such networks, and based on these new metrics propose modified $k$NN and SVM methods for predicting weights of origins and terminals in these networks. We provide experimental results on several real-world datasets, using our geometric methodologies.