Recently, considerable research attention has been paid to graph embedding, a popular approach to construct representations of vertices in latent space. Due to the curse of dimensionality and sparsity in graphical datasets, this approach has become indispensable for machine learning tasks over large networks. The majority of the existing literature has considered this technique under the assumption that the network is static. However, networks in many applications, including social networks, collaboration networks, and recommender systems, nodes, and edges accrue to a growing network as streaming. A small number of very recent results have addressed the problem of embedding for dynamic networks. However, they either rely on knowledge of vertex attributes, su er high-time complexity or need to be re-trained without closed-form expression. Thus the approach of adapting the existing methods designed for static networks or dynamic networks to the streaming environment faces non-trivial technical challenges.
These challenges motivate developing new approaches to the problems of streaming graph embedding. In this paper, we propose a new framework that is able to generate latent representations for new vertices with high e ciency and low complexity under speci ed iteration rounds. We formulate a constrained optimiza- tion problem for the modi cation of the representation resulting from a stream arrival. We show this problem has no closed-form solution and instead develop an online approximation solution. Our solution follows three steps: (1) identify vertices a ected by newly arrived ones, (2) generating latent features for new vertices, and (3) updating the latent features of the most a ected vertices. The new representations are guaranteed to be feasible in the original constrained optimization problem. Meanwhile, the solution only brings about a small change to existing representations and only slightly changes the value of the objective function. Multi-class clas- si cation and clustering on ve real-world networks demonstrate that our model can e ciently update vertex representations and simultaneously achieve comparable or even better performance compared with model retraining.
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The impossibility of low-rank representations for triangle-rich complex networks
The study of complex networks is a significant development in modern science, and has enriched the social sciences, biology, physics, and computer science. Models and algorithms for such networks are pervasive in our society, and impact human behavior via social networks, search engines, and recommender systems, to name a few. A widely used algorithmic technique for modeling such complex networks is to construct a low-dimensional Euclidean embedding of the vertices of the network, where proximity of vertices is interpreted as the likelihood of an edge. Contrary to the common view, we argue that such graph embeddings do not capture salient properties of complex networks. The two properties we focus on are low degree and large clustering coefficients, which have been widely established to be empirically true for real-world networks. We mathematically prove that any embedding (that uses dot products to measure similarity) that can successfully create these two properties must have a rank that is nearly linear in the number of vertices. Among other implications, this establishes that popular embedding techniques such as singular value decomposition and node2vec fail to capture significant structural aspects of real-world complex networks. Furthermore, we empirically study a number of different embedding techniques based on dot product, and show that they all fail to capture the triangle structure.
more » « less- Award ID(s):
- 1740850
- NSF-PAR ID:
- 10137482
- Publisher / Repository:
- Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
- ISSN:
- 0027-8424
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- Article No. 201911030
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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