MBHAN: Motif-Based Heterogeneous Graph Attention Network

Abstract

Graph neural networks are graph-based deep learning technologies that have attracted significant attention from researchers because of their powerful performance. Heterogeneous graph-based graph neural networks focus on the heterogeneity of the nodes and links in a graph. This is more effective at preserving semantic knowledge when representing data interactions in real-world graph structures. Unfortunately, most heterogeneous graph neural networks tend to transform heterogeneous graphs into homogeneous graphs when using meta-paths for representation learning. This paper therefore presents a novel motif-based hierarchical heterogeneous graph attention network algorithm, MBHAN, that addresses this problem by incorporating a hierarchical dual attention mechanism at the node-level and motif-level. Node-level attention aims to learn the importance between a node and its neighboring nodes within its corresponding motif. Motif-level attention is capable of learning the importance of different motifs in the heterogeneous graph. In view of the different vector space features of different types of nodes in heterogeneous graphs, MBHAN also aggregates the features of different types of nodes, so that they can jointly participate in downstream tasks after passing through segregated independent shallow neural networks. MBHAN’s superior network representation learning capability has been validated by extensive experiments on two real-world datasets.

Keywords

• heterogeneous graphs
• graph neural networks
• representation learning
• motif
• attention mechanism