An Information-Explainable Random Walk Based Unsupervised Network Representation Learning Framework on Node Classification Tasks

• Main Authors: Xin Xu, Yang Lu, Yupeng Zhou, Zhiguo Fu, Yanjie Fu, Minghao Yin
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: MDPI AG 2021-07-01
• Series: Mathematics
• Subjects: network representation learning; random walk; stationary distributions; unsupervised learning; network embedding
• Online Access: https://www.mdpi.com/2227-7390/9/15/1767

Network representation learning aims to learn low-dimensional, compressible, and distributed representational vectors of nodes in networks. Due to the expensive costs of obtaining label information of nodes in networks, many unsupervised network representation learning methods have been proposed, where random walk strategy is one of the wildly utilized approaches. However, the existing random walk based methods have some challenges, including: 1. The insufficiency of explaining what network knowledge in the walking path-samplings; 2. The adverse effects caused by the mixture of different information in networks; 3. The poor generality of the methods with hyper-parameters on different networks. This paper proposes an information-explainable random walk based unsupervised network representation learning framework named Probabilistic Accepted Walk (PAW) to obtain network representation from the perspective of the stationary distribution of networks. In the framework, we design two stationary distributions based on nodes’ self-information and local-information of networks to guide our proposed random walk strategy to learn representational vectors of networks through sampling paths of nodes. Numerous experimental results demonstrated that the PAW could obtain more expressive representation than the other six widely used unsupervised network representation learning baselines on four real-world networks in single-label and multi-label node classification tasks.