Unsupervised network embeddings with node identity awareness

Abstract

Abstract A main challenge in mining network-based data is finding effective ways to represent or encode graph structures so that it can be efficiently exploited by machine learning algorithms. Several methods have focused in network representation at node/edge or substructure level. However, many real life challenges related with time-varying, multilayer, chemical compounds and brain networks involve analysis of a family of graphs instead of single one opening additional challenges in graph comparison and representation. Traditional approaches for learning representations relies on hand-crafted specialized features to extract meaningful information about the graphs, e.g. statistical properties, structural motifs, etc. as well as popular graph distances to quantify dissimilarity between networks. In this work we provide an unsupervised approach to learn graph embeddings for a collection of graphs defined on the same set of nodes so that it can be used in numerous graph mining tasks. By using an unsupervised neural network approach on input graphs, we aim to capture the underlying distribution of the data in order to discriminate between different class of networks. Our method is assessed empirically on synthetic and real life datasets and evaluated in three different tasks: graph clustering, visualization and classification. Results reveal that our method outperforms well known graph distances and graph-kernels in clustering and classification tasks, being highly efficient in runtime.