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1. Node Embeddings and Exact Low-Rank Representations of Complex Networks.

   Chanpuriya, Sudhanshu; Musco, Cameron; Sotiropoulos, Konstantinos; Tsourakakis, Charalampos E. (January 2020, Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS))

   null (Ed.)

   Low-dimensional embeddings, from classical spectral embeddings to modern neural-net-inspired methods, are a cornerstone in the modeling and analysis of complex networks. Recent work by Seshadhri et al. (PNAS 2020) suggests that such embeddings cannot capture local structure arising in complex networks. In particular, they show that any network generated from a natural low-dimensional model cannot be both sparse and have high triangle density (high clustering coefficient), two hallmark properties of many real-world networks. In this work we show that the results of Seshadhri et al. are intimately connected to the model they use rather than the low-dimensional structure of complex networks. Specifically, we prove that a minor relaxation of their model can generate sparse graphs with high triangle density. Surprisingly, we show that this same model leads to exact low-dimensional factorizations of many real-world networks. We give a simple algorithm based on logistic principal component analysis (LPCA) that succeeds in finding such exact embeddings. Finally, we perform a large number of experiments that verify the ability of very low-dimensional embeddings to capture local structure in real-world networks. 

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2. Real-Time Streaming Graph Embedding Through Local Actions

   https://doi.org/10.1145/3308560.3316585  

   Liu, Xi; Hsieh, Ping-Chun; Duffield, Nick; Chen, Rui; Xie, Muhe; Wen, Xidao (May 2019, Companion Proceedings of the 2019 World Wide Web Conference (WWW ’19 Companion))

   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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3. Attributed Graph Clustering: an Attribute-aware Graph Embedding Approach

   Akbas, Esra; Zhao, Peixiang (January 2017, 2017 IEEE/ACM International Conference on Advances in Social Networks Analysis and Mining)

   Graph clustering is a fundamental problem in social network analysis, the goal of which is to group vertices of a graph into a series of densely knitted clusters with each cluster well separated from all the others. Classical graph clustering methods take advantage of the graph topology to model and quantify vertex proximity. With the proliferation of rich graph contents, such as user profiles in social networks, and gene annotations in protein interaction networks, it is essential to consider both the structure and content information of graphs for high-quality graph clustering. In this paper, we propose a graph embedding approach to clustering content-enriched graphs. The key idea is to embed each vertex of a graph into a continuous vector space where the localized structural and attributive information of vertices can be encoded in a unified, latent representation. Specifically, we quantify vertex-wise attribute proximity into edge weights, and employ truncated, attribute-aware random walks to learn the latent representations for vertices. We evaluate our attribute-aware graph embedding method in real-world attributed graphs, and the results demonstrate its effectiveness in comparison with state-of-the-art algorithms. 

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4. Learning Network Embedding with Community Structural Information

   https://doi.org/10.24963/ijcai.2019/407  

   Li, Yu; Wang, Ying; Zhang, Tingting; Zhang, Jiawei; Chang, Yi (August 2019, Proceedings of the 28th International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence)

   Network embedding is an effective approach to learn the low-dimensional representations of vertices in networks, aiming to capture and preserve the structure and inherent properties of networks. The vast majority of existing network embedding methods exclusively focus on vertex proximity of networks, while ignoring the network internal community structure. However, the homophily principle indicates that vertices within the same community are more similar to each other than those from different communities, thus vertices within the same community should have similar vertex representations. Motivated by this, we propose a novel network embedding framework NECS to learn the Network Embedding with Community Structural information, which preserves the high-order proximity and incorporates the community structure in vertex representation learning. We formulate the problem into a principled optimization framework and provide an effective alternating algorithm to solve it. Extensive experimental results on several benchmark network datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed framework in various network analysis tasks including network reconstruction, link prediction and vertex classification. 

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5. Link prediction using low-dimensional node embeddings: The measurement problem

   https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2312527121  

   Menand, Nicolas; Seshadhri, C (February 2024, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences)

   Graph representation learning is a fundamental technique for machine learning (ML) on complex networks. Given an input network, these methods represent the vertices by low-dimensional real-valued vectors. These vectors can be used for a multitude of downstream ML tasks. We study one of the most important such task, link prediction. Much of the recent literature on graph representation learning has shown remarkable success in link prediction. On closer investigation, we observe that the performance is measured by the AUC (area under the curve), which suffers biases. Since the ground truth in link prediction is sparse, we design a vertex-centric measure of performance, called the VCMPR@k plots. Under this measure, we show that link predictors using graph representations show poor scores. Despite having extremely high AUC scores, the predictors miss much of the ground truth. We identify a mathematical connection between this performance, the sparsity of the ground truth, and the low-dimensional geometry of the node embeddings. Under a formal theoretical framework, we prove that low-dimensional vectors cannot capture sparse ground truth using dot product similarities (the standard practice in the literature). Our results call into question existing results on link prediction and pose a significant scientific challenge for graph representation learning. The VCMPR plots identify specific scientific challenges for link prediction using low-dimensional node embeddings. 

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