Towards a Translation-Based Method for Dynamic Heterogeneous Network Embedding

Abstract

Network embedding, which aims to map the discrete network topology to a continuous low-dimensional representation space with the major topological properties preserved, has emerged as an essential technique to support various network inference tasks. However, incorporating both the evolutionary nature and the network's heterogeneity remains a challenge for existing network embedding methods. In this study, we propose a novel Translation-Based Dynamic Heterogeneous Network Embedding (TransDHE) approach to consider both the aspects simultaneously. For a dynamic heterogeneous network with a sequence of snapshots and multiple types of nodes and edges, we introduce a translation-based embedding module to capture the heterogeneous characteristics (e.g., type information) of each single snapshot. An orthogonal alignment module and RNN-based aggregation module are then applied to explore the evolutionary patterns among multiple successive snapshots for the final representation learning. Extensive experiments on a set of real-world networks demonstrate that TransDHE can derive the more informative embedding result for the network dynamic and heterogeneity over state-of-the-art network embedding baselines.