A Heterogeneous Network Representation Method Based on Variational Inference and Meta-Path Decomposition

Abstract

Aimed at the problem that the traditional meta-path random walk in heterogeneous network representation cannot accurately describe the heterogeneous network structure and cannot capture the true distribution of network nodes well, a heterogeneous network representation method based on variational inference and meta-path decomposition is proposed, which is named HetVAE. First, combining with the idea of path similarity, a node selection strategy is designed to improve the random walk of the meta-path. Next, the variational theory is introduced to effectively sample the latent variables in the original distribution. After that, a personalized attention machanism is implemented, which weights the node vector representation of different sub-networks obtained by decomposition. Then, these node vectors are fused by the proposed model, so that the final node vector representation can have richer semantic information. Finally, several experiments on different network tasks are performed on the three real data sets of DBLP, AMiner, and Yelp. The effectiveness of the model is verified by these results. In node classification and node clustering tasks, compared with some state-of-the-art algorithms, the Micro-F1 and normalized mutual information (NMI) increase by 1.12% to 4.36% and 1.35% to 18% respectively. It is proved that HetVAE can effectively capture the heterogeneous network structure and learn the node vetcor representation that conforms more with the true distribution.

Keywords

• heterogeneous network
• network representation
• variational autoencoder
• random walk
• attention mechanism