RaRE: Social Rank Regulated Large-scale Network Embedding

Network embedding algorithms that map nodes in a network into a low-dimensional vector space are prevalent in recent years, due to their superior performance in many network-based tasks, such as clustering, classification, and link prediction. The main assumption of existing algorithms is that the learned latent representation for nodes should preserve the structure of the network, in terms of firstorder or higher-order connectivity. In other words, nodes that are more similar will have higher probability to connect to each other. This phenomena is typically explained as homophily in network science. However, there is another factor usually neglected by the existing embedding algorithms, which is the popularity of a node. For example, celebrities in a social network usually receive numerous followers, which cannot be fully explained by the similarity of the two users. We denote this factor with the terminology “social rank”. We then propose a network embedding model that considers both of the two factors in link generation, and learn proximity-based embedding and social rank-based embedding separately. Rather than simply treating these two factors independent with each other, a carefully designed link generation model is proposed, which explicitly models the interdependency between these two types of embeddings. Experiments on several real-world datasets across different domains demonstrate the superiority of our novel network embedding model over the state-of-the-art methods.