MARU: Meta-context Aware Random Walks for Heterogeneous Network Representation Learning

Abstract

Information networks, such as social and citation networks, are ubiquitous in the real world so that network analysis plays an important role in data mining and knowledge discovery. To alleviate the sparsity problem of network analysis, it is common to capture the network semantics by projecting nodes onto a vector space as network embeddings. Moreover, random walks are usually exploited to efficiently learn node embeddings and preserve network proximity. In addition to proximity structure, heterogeneous networks have more knowledge about the types of nodes. However, to profit from heterogeneous knowledge, most of the existing approaches guide the random walks through predefined meta-paths or specific strategies, which can distort the understanding of network structures. Furthermore, traditional random walk-based approaches much favor the nodes with higher degrees while other nodes are equivalently important for the downstream applications. In this paper, we propose Meta-context Aware Random Walks (MARU) to overcome these challenges, thereby learning richer and more unbiased representations for heterogeneous networks. To reduce the bias in classical random walks, the algorithm of bidirectional extended random walks is introduced to improve the fairness of representation learning. Based on the enhanced random walks, the meta-context aware skip-gram model is then presented to learn robust network embeddings with dynamic meta-contexts. Therefore, MARU can not only fairly understand the overall network structures but also leverage the sophisticated heterogeneous knowledge in the networks. Extensive experiments have been conducted on three real-world large-scale publicly available datasets. The experimental results demonstrate that MARU significantly outperforms state-of-the-art heterogeneous network embedding methods across three general machine learning tasks, including multi-label node classification, node clustering, and link prediction.