Classification of Actors in Social Networks Using RLVECO

Abstract

Several activities, comprising animate and inanimate entities, can be examined by means of Social Network Analysis (SNA). Classification tasks within social network structures remain crucial research problems in SNA. Inherent and latent facts about social graphs can be effectively exploited for training Artificial Intelligence (AI) models in a bid to categorize actors/nodes as well as identify clusters with respect to a given social network. Thus, important factors such as the individual attributes of spatial social actors and the underlying patterns of relationship binding these social actors must be taken into consideration. These factors are relevant to understanding the nature and dynamics of a given social graph. In this paper, we have proposed a hybrid model: Representation Learning via Knowledge-Graph Embeddings and Convolution Operations (RLVECO) which has been modelled for studying and extracting meaningful facts from social network structures to aid in node classification and community detection problems. RLVECO utilizes an edge sampling approach for exploiting features of a social graph, via learning the context of each actor with respect to its neighboring actors, with the aim of generating vector-space embeddings per actor which are further exploited for unexpressed representations via a sequence of convolution operations. Successively, these relatively low-dimensional representations are fed as input features to a downstream classifier for solving community detection and node classification problems about a given social network.