HRank: A Path Based Ranking Method in Heterogeneous Information Network

Recently, there is a surge of interests on heterogeneous information network analysis. Although evaluating the importance of objects has been well studied in homogeneous networks, it is not yet exploited in heterogeneous networks. In this paper, we study the ranking problem in heterogeneous networks and propose the HRank method to evaluate the importance of multiple types of objects and meta paths. A constrained meta path is proposed to subtly capture the rich semantics in heterogeneous networks. Since the importance of objects depends upon the meta paths in heterogeneous networks, HRank develops a path based random walk process. Furthermore, HRank can simultaneously determine the importance of objects and meta paths through applying the tensor analysis. Experiments on three real datasets show that HRank can effectively evaluate the importance of objects and paths together. Moreover, the constrained meta path shows its potential on mining subtle semantics by obtaining more accurate ranking results.