Determinable and interpretable network representation for link prediction

Abstract

As an intuitive description of complex physical, social, or brain systems, complex networks have fascinated scientists for decades. Recently, to abstract a network’s topological and dynamical attributes, network representation has been a prevalent technique, which can map a network or substructures (like nodes) into a low-dimensional vector space. Since its mainstream methods are mostly based on machine learning, a black box of an input-output data fitting mechanism, the learned vector’s dimension is indeterminable and the elements are not interpreted. Although massive efforts to cope with this issue have included, say, automated machine learning by computer scientists and learning theory by mathematicians, the root causes still remain unresolved. Consequently, enterprises need to spend enormous computing resources to work out a set of model hyperparameters that can bring good performance, and business personnel still finds difficulties in explaining the learned vector’s practical meaning. Given that, from a physical perspective, this article proposes two determinable and interpretable node representation methods. To evaluate their effectiveness and generalization, this article proposes Adaptive and Interpretable ProbS (AIProbS), a network-based model that can utilize node representations for link prediction. Experimental results showed that the AIProbS can reach state-of-the-art precision beyond baseline models on some small data whose distribution of training and test sets is usually not unified enough for machine learning methods to perform well. Besides, it can make a good trade-off with machine learning methods on precision, determinacy (or robustness), and interpretability. In practice, this work contributes to industrial companies without enough computing resources but who pursue good results based on small data during their early stage of development and who require high interpretability to better understand and carry out their business.