TNE: A Latent Model for Representation Learning on Networks

Abstract: Network representation learning (NRL) methods aim to map each vertex into a low dimensional space by preserving the local and global structure of a given network, and in recent years they have received a significant attention thanks to their success in several challenging problems. Although various approaches have been proposed to compute node embeddings, many successful methods benefit from random walks in order to transform a given network into a collection of sequences of nodes and then they target to learn the representation of nodes by predicting the context of each vertex within the sequence. In this paper, we introduce a general framework to enhance the embeddings of nodes acquired by means of the random walk-based approaches. Similar to the notion of topical word embeddings in NLP, the proposed method assigns each vertex to a topic with the favor of various statistical models and community detection methods, and then generates the enhanced community representations. We evaluate our method on two downstream tasks: node classification and link prediction. The experimental results demonstrate that the incorporation of vertex and topic embeddings outperform widely-known baseline NRL methods.