Competition Analysis on Enterprise Ecosystems via Multiview Relational Hypergraph Embedding

Abstract

Enterprise competition analysis has long been treated as a crucial task of management science, which can reveal pertinent information about market saturation and business opportunities to support the decision-making process of entrepreneurs and investors. Recently, with the development of graph representation techniques, enterprises could be now formulated in a novel graph-oriented perspective to model their cooperation and competition in a directional graph. However, these prior arts mainly treat the enterprises as individual nodes, while the ecosystems, i.e., enterprise groups formed based on their common interests, and consequent interaction effects have been largely ignored. To address this issue, in this article, by adapting the concept of hypergraph to describe enterprise ecosystems, we propose a novel multiview enterprise relation network (MERN) framework for enterprise competition analysis. Specifically, we first put forward a hypertranslating embedding (HTransE) algorithm inspired by translation distance models for the hyperrelation embedding of ecosystems. Meanwhile, a relational graph convolutional network (RGCN) is designed for ordinary relation embedding, e.g., supplier, client, or competitor. Afterward, considering the commercial diversity in ecosystems, which means that different enterprises may focus on different industry fields, we propose an industry trend embedding module to describe industry distribution and development trend factors for each enterprise. Finally, we apply the self-attention mechanism to integrate these three modules and adapt the bilinear model DistMult for competition link analysis. Extensive experiments on a real-world dataset validate that our solution can achieve better performance compared with several competitive baselines.