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Title: Disentangled Network Alignment with Matching Explainability
Network alignment (NA) is a fundamental problem in many application domains – from social networks, through biology and communications, to neuroscience. The main objective is to identify common nodes and most similar connections across multiple networks (resp. graphs). Many of the existing efforts focus on efficient anchor node linkage by leveraging various features and optimizing network mapping functions with the pairwise similarity between anchor nodes. Despite the recent advances, there still exist two kinds of challenges: (1) entangled node embeddings, arising from the contradictory goals of NA: embedding proximal nodes in a closed form for representation in a single network vs. discriminating among them when mapping the nodes across networks; and (2) lack of interpretability about the node matching and alignment, essential for understanding prediction tasks. We propose dNAME (disentangled Network Alignment with Matching Explainability) – a novel solution for NA in heterogeneous networks settings, based on a matching technique that embeds nodes in a disentangled and faithful manner. The NA task is cast as an adversarial optimization problem which learns a proximity-preserving model locally around the anchor nodes, while still being discriminative. We also introduce a method to explain our semi-supervised model with the theory of robust statistics, by tracing the importance of each anchor node and its explanations on the NA performance. This is extensible to many other NA methods, as it provides model interpretability. Experiments conducted on several public datasets show that dNAME outperforms the state-of-the-art methods in terms of both network alignment precision and node matching ranking.  more » « less
Award ID(s):
1823279 1823267
PAR ID:
10122599
Author(s) / Creator(s):
; ; ; ; ;
Date Published:
Journal Name:
2019 {IEEE} Conference on Computer Communications, {INFOCOM} 2019, Paris, France, April 29 - May 2, 2019
Page Range / eLocation ID:
1360 to 1368
Format(s):
Medium: X
Sponsoring Org:
National Science Foundation
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