Efficient and Effective Edge-wise Graph Representation Learning

Abstract

Graph representation learning (GRL) is a powerful tool for graph analysis, which has gained massive attention from both academia and industry due to its superior performance in various real-world applications. However, the majority of existing works for GRL are dedicated to node-based tasks and thus focus on producing node representations. Despite such methods can be used to derive edge representations by regarding edges as nodes, they suffer from sub-par result utility in practical edge-wise applications, such as financial fraud detection and review spam combating, due to neglecting the unique properties of edges and their inherent drawbacks. Moreover, to our knowledge, there is a paucity of research devoted to edge representation learning. These methods either require high computational costs in sampling random walks or yield severely compromised representation quality because of falling short of capturing high-order information between edges. To address these challenges, we present TER and AER, which generate high-quality edge representation vectors based on the graph structure surrounding edges and edge attributes, respectively. In particular, TER can accurately encode high-order proximities of edges into low-dimensional vectors in a practically efficient and theoretically sound way, while AER augments edge attributes through a carefully-designed feature aggregation scheme. Our extensive experimental study demonstrates that the combined edge representations of TER and AER can achieve significantly superior performance in terms of edge classification on 8 real-life datasets, while being up to one order of magnitude faster than 16 baselines on large graphs.