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1. Higher-Order Networks Representation and Learning: A Survey

   https://doi.org/10.1145/3682112.3682114  

   Tian, Hao; Zafarani, Reza (July 2024, ACM SIGKDD Explorations Newsletter)

   Network data has become widespread, larger, and more complex over the years. Traditional network data is dyadic, capturing the relations among pairs of entities. With the need to model interactions among more than two entities, significant research has focused on higher-order networks and ways to represent, analyze, and learn from them. There are two main directions to studying higher-order networks. One direction has focused on capturing higher-order patterns in traditional (dyadic) graphs by changing the basic unit of study from nodes to small frequently observed subgraphs, called motifs. As most existing network data comes in the form of pairwise dyadic relationships, studying higher-order structures within such graphs may uncover new insights. The second direction aims to directly model higher-order interactions using new and more complex representations such as simplicial complexes or hypergraphs. Some of these models have long been proposed, but improvements in computational power and the advent of new computational techniques have increased their popularity. Our goal in this paper is to provide a succinct yet comprehensive summary of the advanced higher-order network analysis techniques. We provide a systematic review of the foundations and algorithms, along with use cases and applications of higher-order networks in various scientific domains. 

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2. BScNets: Block Simplicial Complex Neural Networks

   https://doi.org/10.1609/aaai.v36i6.20583  

   Chen, Yuzhou; Gel, Yulia R.; Poor, H. Vincent (June 2022, Proceedings of the AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence)

   Simplicial neural networks (SNNs) have recently emerged as a new direction in graph learning which expands the idea of convolutional architectures from node space to simplicial complexes on graphs. Instead of predominantly assessing pairwise relations among nodes as in the current practice, simplicial complexes allow us to describe higher-order interactions and multi-node graph structures. By building upon connection between the convolution operation and the new block Hodge-Laplacian, we propose the first SNN for link prediction. Our new Block Simplicial Complex Neural Networks (BScNets) model generalizes existing graph convolutional network (GCN) frameworks by systematically incorporating salient interactions among multiple higher-order graph structures of different dimensions. We discuss theoretical foundations behind BScNets and illustrate its utility for link prediction on eight real-world and synthetic datasets. Our experiments indicate that BScNets outperforms the state-of-the-art models by a significant margin while maintaining low computation costs. Finally, we show utility of BScNets as a new promising alternative for tracking spread of infectious diseases such as COVID-19 and measuring the effectiveness of the healthcare risk mitigation strategies. 

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3. Distance Encoding: Design Provably More Powerful Neural Networks for Graph Representation Learning

   Li, Pan; Wang, Yanbang; Wang, Hongwei; Leskovec, Jure. (January 2020, Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS))

   Learning representations of sets of nodes in a graph is crucial for applications ranging from node-role discovery to link prediction and molecule classification. Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have achieved great success in graph representation learning. However, expressive power of GNNs is limited by the 1-Weisfeiler-Lehman (WL) test and thus GNNs generate identical representations for graph substructures that may in fact be very different. More powerful GNNs, proposed recently by mimicking higher-order-WL tests, only focus on representing entire graphs and they are computationally inefficient as they cannot utilize sparsity of the underlying graph. Here we propose and mathematically analyze a general class of structure related features, termed Distance Encoding (DE). DE assists GNNs in representing any set of nodes, while providing strictly more expressive power than the 1-WL test. DE captures the distance between the node set whose representation is to be learned and each node in the graph. To capture the distance DE can apply various graph-distance measures such as shortest path distance or generalized PageRank scores. We propose two ways for GNNs to use DEs (1) as extra node features, and (2) as controllers of message aggregation in GNNs. Both approaches can utilize the sparse structure of the underlying graph, which leads to computational efficiency and scalability. We also prove that DE can distinguish node sets embedded in almost all regular graphs where traditional GNNs always fail. We evaluate DE on three tasks over six real networks: structural role prediction, link prediction, and triangle prediction. Results show that our models outperform GNNs without DE by up-to 15% in accuracy and AUROC. Furthermore, our models also significantly outperform other state-of-the-art methods especially designed for the above tasks. 

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4. Hypergraph Partitioning with Embeddings

   https://doi.org/10.1109/TKDE.2020.3017120  

   Sybrandt, Justin; Shaydulin, Ruslan; Safro, Ilya (December 2020, IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering)

   null (Ed.)

   HYPERGRAPHS provide the formalism needed to solve problems consisting of interconnected item sets. Similar to a traditional graph, the hypergraph has the added generalization that “hyperedges” may connect any number of nodes. Domains such as very-large-scale integration for creating integrated circuits [1], machine learning [2], [3], [4], parallel algorithms [5], combinatorial scientific computing [6], and social network analysis [7], [8] all contain significant and challenging instances of hypergraph problems. One important problem, Hypergraph partitioning, involves dividing the nodes of a hypergraph among k similarly-sized disjoint sets while reducing the number of hyperedges that span multiple partitions. In the context of load balancing, this is the problem of dividing logical threads (nodes) that share data dependencies (hyperedges) among available machines (partitions) in order to balance the number of threads per machine and minimize communication overhead. However, hypergraph partitioning is both NP-Hard to solve [9] and approximate [10]. 

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5. Attacking Similarity-Based Link Prediction in Social Networks

   Zhou, Kai; Michalak, Tomasz; Waniek, Marcin; Rahwan, Talal; Vorobeychik, Yevgeniy (January 2019, International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems)

   Link prediction is one of the fundamental problems in computational social science. A particularly common means to predict existence of unobserved links is via structural similarity metrics, such as the number of common neighbors; node pairs with higher similarity are thus deemed more likely to be linked. However, a number of applications of link prediction, such as predicting links in gang or terrorist networks, are adversarial, with another party incentivized to minimize its effectiveness by manipulating observed information about the network. We offer a comprehensive algorithmic investigation of the problem of attacking similarity-based link prediction through link deletion, focusing on two broad classes of such approaches, one which uses only local information about target links, and another which uses global network information. While we show several variations of the general problem to be NP-Hard for both local and global metrics, we exhibit a number of well-motivated special cases which are tractable. Additionally, we provide principled and empirically effective algorithms for the intractable cases, in some cases proving worst-case approximation guarantees. 

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