An Unsupervised Rapid Network Alignment Framework via Network Coarsening

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Network alignment aims to identify the correspondence of nodes between two or more networks. It is the cornerstone of many network mining tasks, such as cross-platform recommendation and cross-network data aggregation. Recently, with the development of network representation learning techniques, researchers have proposed many embedding-based network alignment methods. The effect is better than traditional methods. However, several issues and challenges remain for network alignment tasks, such as lack of labeled data, mapping across network embedding spaces, and computational efficiency. Based on the graph neural network (GNN), we propose the URNA (unsupervised rapid network alignment) framework to achieve an effective balance between accuracy and efficiency. There are two phases: model training and network alignment. We exploit coarse networks to accelerate the training of GNN after first compressing the original networks into small networks. We also use parameter sharing to guarantee the consistency of embedding spaces and an unsupervised loss function to update the parameters. In the network alignment phase, we first use a once-pass forward propagation to learn node embeddings of original networks, and then we use multi-order embeddings from the outputs of all convolutional layers to calculate the similarity of nodes between the two networks via vector inner product for alignment. Experimental results on real-world datasets show that the proposed method can significantly reduce running time and memory requirements while guaranteeing alignment performance.