A Normalizing Flow-Based Co-Embedding Model for Attributed Networks

Document Type

Article

Publication Title

ACM Transactions on Knowledge Discovery from Data

Abstract

Network embedding is a technique that aims at inferring the low-dimensional representations of nodes in a semantic space. In this article, we study the problem of inferring the low-dimensional representations of both nodes and attributes for attributed networks in the same semantic space such that the affinity between a node and an attribute can be effectively measured. Intuitively, this problem can be addressed by simply utilizing existing variational auto-encoder (VAE) based network embedding algorithms. However, the variational posterior distribution in previous VAE based network embedding algorithms is often assumed and restricted to be a mean-field Gaussian distribution or other simple distribution families, which results in poor inference of the embeddings. To alleviate the above defect, we propose a novel VAE-based co-embedding method for attributed network, F-CAN, where posterior distributions are flexible, complex, and scalable distributions constructed through the normalizing flow. We evaluate our proposed models on a number of network tasks with several benchmark datasets. Experimental results demonstrate that there are clear improvements in the qualities of embeddings generated by our model to the state-of-the-art attributed network embedding methods.

DOI

10.1145/3477049

Publication Date

10-22-2021

Keywords

Attributed network, embedding, normalizing flow, variational auto-encoder

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