Cross-network embedding for multi-network alignment

Abstract

Recently, data mining through analyzing the complex structure and diverse relationships on multi-network has attracted much attention in both academia and industry. One crucial prerequisite for this kind of multi-network mining is to map the nodes across different networks, i.e., so-called network alignment. In this paper, we propose a cross-network embedding method CrossMNA for multi-network alignment problem through investigating structural information only. Unlike previous methods focusing on pair-wise learning and holding the topology consistent assumption, our proposed CrossMNA considers the multi-network scenarios which involve at least two types of networks with diverse network structures. CrossMNA leverages the cross-network information to refine two types of node embedding vectors, i.e., inter-vector for network alignment and intra-vector for other downstream network analysis tasks. Finally, we verify the effectiveness and efficiency of our proposed method using several real-world datasets. The extensive experiments show that our CrossMNA can significantly outperform the existing baseline methods on multi-network alignment task, and also achieve better performance for link prediction task with less memory usage.