Network alignment aims at inferring a set of anchor links matching the shared entities between different information networks, which has become a prerequisite step for effective fusion of multiple information networks. In this paper, we will study the network alignment problem to fuse online social networks specifically. Social network alignment is extremely challenging to address due to several reasons, i.e., lack of training data, network heterogeneity and one-to-one constraint. Existing network alignment works usually require a large number of training data, but such a demand can hardly be met in applications, as manual anchor link labeling is extremely expensive. Significantly different from other homogeneous network alignment works, information in online social networks is usually of heterogeneous categories, the incorporation of which in model building is not an easy task. Furthermore, the one-to-one cardinality constraint on anchor links renders their inference process intertwistingly correlated. To resolve these three challenges, a novel network alignment model, namely ActiveIter, is introduced in this paper. ActiveIter defines a set of inter-network meta diagrams for anchor link feature extraction, adopts active learning for effective label query and uses greedy link selection for anchor link cardinality filtering. Extensive experiments are conducted on real-world aligned networks datasets, and the experimental results have demonstrated the effectiveness of ActiveIter compared with other state-of-the-art baseline methods.
Across the aligned networks, various application problems have been studied. Cross-site heterogeneous link prediction problems are studied by @cite_13 by transferring links across partially aligned networks. Besides link prediction problems, Jin and proposes to partition multiple large-scale social networks simultaneously in @cite_31 . The problem of information diffusion across partially aligned networks is studied by in @cite_12 , where the traditional LT diffusion model is extended to the multiple heterogeneous information setting. give a comprehensive survey about the existing works on heterogeneous information networks in @cite_23 , which includes a section talking about network information fusion works and related application problems in detail.
@cite_23 @cite_31 @cite_13 @cite_12
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Online social networks have gained great success in recent years. Some online social networks only involving users and social links among users can be represented as homogeneous networks. Meanwhile, some other social networks containing abundant information, which include multiple kinds of nodes and complex relationships, can be denoted as heterogeneous networks. Predicting the missing links or links that will be formed in the future based on a snapshot of social networks is formally defined as the link prediction problem. Link prediction problems have extensive applications in real-world social networks and many concrete social services can be cast as link prediction tasks, e.g., friend and location recommendations can all be solved as the problem of predicting social links among users and the location links between users and locations. Link prediction problems have been an important research topic for many years and a large number of different methods have been proposed so far. This article summaries the existing link prediction methods for both homogeneous and heterogeneous networks, which include various unsupervised link predicators, random walk based link prediction methods, methods based on matrix factorization techniques, supervised link prediction methods and meta paths based link prediction methods. Meanwhile, as proposed in recent works, people are usually involved in multiple social networks simultaneously nowadays and networks sharing common users are formally defined as the aligned networks. In this article, we will also introduce the latest progress of link prediction problems across multiple aligned heterogeneous networks. The link prediction problems across aligned networks can include anchor link prediction problem and link transfer across aligned heterogeneous networks. We will introduce the newly proposed methods to solve these problems in details and, finally, we will conclude this survey with a discussion about the future link prediction research works. Online social networks can often be represented as heterogeneous information networks containing abundant information about: who, where, when and what. Nowadays, people are usually involved in multiple social networks simultaneously. The multiple accounts of the same user in different networks are mostly isolated from each other without any connection between them. Discovering the correspondence of these accounts across multiple social networks is a crucial prerequisite for many interesting inter-network applications, such as link recommendation and community analysis using information from multiple networks. In this paper, we study the problem of anchor link prediction across multiple heterogeneous social networks, i.e., discovering the correspondence among different accounts of the same user. Unlike most prior work on link prediction and network alignment, we assume that the anchor links are one-to-one relationships (i.e., no two edges share a common endpoint) between the accounts in two social networks, and a small number of anchor links are known beforehand. We propose to extract heterogeneous features from multiple heterogeneous networks for anchor link prediction, including user's social, spatial, temporal and text information. Then we formulate the inference problem for anchor links as a stable matching problem between the two sets of user accounts in two different networks. An effective solution, MNA (Multi-Network Anchoring), is derived to infer anchor links w.r.t. the one-to-one constraint. Extensive experiments on two real-world heterogeneous social networks show that our MNA model consistently outperform other commonly-used baselines on anchor link prediction. Online social networks offering various services have become ubiquitous in our daily life. Meanwhile, users nowadays are usually involved in multiple online social networks simultaneously to enjoy specific services provided by different networks. Formally, social networks that share some common users are named as partially aligned networks. In this paper, we want to predict the formation of social links in multiple partially aligned social networks at the same time, which is formally defined as the multi-network link (formation) prediction problem. In multiple partially aligned social networks, users can be extensively correlated with each other by various connections. To categorize these diverse connections among users, 7 "intra-network social meta paths" and 4 categories of "inter-network social meta paths" are proposed in this paper. These "social meta paths" can cover a wide variety of connection information in the network, some of which can be helpful for solving the multi-network link prediction problem but some can be not. To utilize useful connection, a subset of the most informative "social meta paths" are picked, the process of which is formally defined as "social meta path selection" in this paper. An effective general link formation prediction framework, Mli (Multi-network Link Identifier), is proposed in this paper to solve the multi-network link (formation) prediction problem. Built with heterogenous topological features extracted based on the selected "social meta paths" in the multiple partially aligned social networks, Mli can help refine and disambiguate the prediction results reciprocally in all aligned networks. Extensive experiments conducted on real-world partially aligned heterogeneous networks, Foursquare and Twitter, demonstrate that Mli can solve the multi-network link prediction problem very well. Heterogenous information network embedding aims to embed heterogenous information networks (HINs) into low dimensional spaces, in which each vertex is represented as a low-dimensional vector, and both global and local network structures in the original space are preserved. However, most of existing heterogenous information network embedding models adopt the dot product to measure the proximity in the low dimensional space, and thus they can only preserve the first-order proximity and are insufficient to capture the global structure. Compared with homogenous information networks, there are multiple types of links (i.e., multiple relations) in HINs, and the link distribution w.r.t relations is highly skewed. To address the above challenging issues, we propose a novel heterogenous information network embedding model PME based on the metric learning to capture both first-order and second-order proximities in a unified way. To alleviate the potential geometrical inflexibility of existing metric learning approaches, we propose to build object and relation embeddings in separate object space and relation spaces rather than in a common space. Afterwards, we learn embeddings by firstly projecting vertices from object space to corresponding relation space and then calculate the proximity between projected vertices. To overcome the heavy skewness of the link distribution w.r.t relations and avoid "over-sampling'' or "under-sampling'' for each relation, we propose a novel loss-aware adaptive sampling approach for the model optimization. Extensive experiments have been conducted on a large-scale HIN dataset, and the experimental results show superiority of our proposed PME model in terms of prediction accuracy and scalability.