Attribute Augmented Network Embedding Based on Generative Adversarial Nets

Network embedding is to learn low-dimensional representations of nodes while preserving necessary information for network analysis tasks. Though representations preserving both structure and attribute features have achieved in many real-world applications, learning these representations for networks with attribute information is difficult due to the heterogeneity between structure and attribute information. Many existing methods have been proposed to preserve explicit proximities between nodes, with optimization limited to node pairs with large structure and attribute proximities, which may lead to overfitting. To address the above problems, we adopt an attribute augmented network to represent attribute and structure information in a unified framework. Specifically, we study the problem of attribute augmented network embedding that exploits the strength of generative adversarial nets (ANGANs) in capturing the latent distribution of data to learn robust and informative representations of nodes. The ANGAN method obtains the low-dimensional representations of nodes through adversarial learning between the generative and discriminative models. The generative model approximates the underlying connectivity and attributes distributions of nodes by using the distributions generated from the learned representations. It is implemented by utilizing the properties of the attribute augmented network to improve the traditional Skip-gram model. The discriminative model is designed as a binary classifier to distinguish the truly connected node pairs from the generated ones. The pre-training algorithm and the teacher forcing approach are adopted to improve training efficiency and stability. Empirical results show that ANGAN generally outperforms state-of-the-art methods in various real-world applications, which demonstrates the effectiveness and generality of our method.