Network representation learning: a systematic literature review

Abstract

Omnipresent network/graph data generally have the characteristics of nonlinearity, sparseness, dynamicity and heterogeneity, which bring numerous challenges to network related analysis problem. Recently, influenced by the excellent ability of deep learning to learn representation from data, representation learning for network data has gradually become a new research hotspot. Network representation learning aims to learn a project from given network data in the original topological space to low-dimensional vector space, while encoding a variety of structural and semantic information. The vector representation obtained could effectively support extensive tasks such as node classification, node clustering, link prediction and graph classification. In this survey, we comprehensively present an overview of a large number of network representation learning algorithms from two clear points of view of homogeneous network and heterogeneous network. The corresponding algorithms are deeply analyzed. Extensive applications are introduced in an all-round way, and related experiments are conducted to validate the typical algorithms. Finally, we point out five future promising directions for next research in terms of theory and application.