Efficient attributed network embedding via recursive randomized hashing

Abstract

Attributed network embedding aims to learn a low-dimensional representation for each node of a network, considering both attributes and structure information of the node. However, the learning based methods usually involve substantial cost in time, which makes them impractical without the help of a powerful workhorse. In this paper, we propose a simple yet effective algorithm, named NetHash, to solve this problem only with moderate computing capacity. NetHash employs the randomized hashing technique to encode shallow trees, each of which is rooted at a node of the network. The main idea is to efficiently encode both attributes and structure information of each node by recursively sketching the corresponding rooted tree from bottom (i.e., the predefined highest-order neighboring nodes) to top (i.e., the root node), and particularly, to preserve as much information closer to the root node as possible. Our extensive experimental results show that the proposed algorithm, which does not need learning, runs significantly faster than the state-of-the-art learning-based network embedding methods while achieving competitive or even better performance in accuracy.