Homogeneous Graph Extraction: An Approach to Learning Heterogeneous Graph Embedding

Heterogeneous Graph Neural Networks (HGNNs) aim to embed rich structural and semantic information of heterogeneous graphs into low-dimensional node representations. While HGNNs extend the foundational work of homogeneous Graph Neural Networks, the methodology for effectively transforming heterogeneous graphs into homogeneous graphs and then learning node representations remains under-explored. In this paper, we propose a novel heterogeneous graph embedding method via the Homogeneous Graph Extraction strategy, termed HGE. Specifically, the proposed method ingeniously harnesses information clusters and metapaths to extract tailored homogeneous graphs from the complex heterogeneous graph. Subsequently, these distilled homogeneous graphs are fed into a weight-shared homogeneous graph encoder to obtain embeddings with diverse semantic information. Finally, we employ an attention mechanism, which adeptly fuses embeddings derived from distinct homogeneous graphs, resulting in the more expressive capability of the nodes. The effectiveness of the proposed architecture was demonstrated through experiments on three real heterogeneous graph datasets.