Recently, network embedding that encodes structural information of graphs into a vector space has become popular for network analysis. Although recent methods show promising performance for various applications, the huge sizes of graphs may hinder a direct application of existing network embedding method to them. This paper presents NECL, a novel efficient Network Embedding method with two goals. 1) Is there an ideal Compression of a network? 2) Will the compression of a network significantly boost the representation Learning of the network? For the first problem, we propose a neighborhood similarity based graph compression method that compresses the input graph to get a smaller graph without losing any much information about the global structure of the graph and the local proximity of the vertices in the graph. For the second problem, we use the compressed graph for network embedding instead of the original large graph to bring down the embedding cost. NECL is a general meta-strategy to improve the efficiency of all of the state-of-the-art graph embedding algorithms based on random walks, including DeepWalk and Node2vec, without losing their effectiveness. Extensive experiments on large real-world networks validate the efficiency of NECL method that yields an average improvement of 23 - 57 embedding time, including walking and learning time without decreasing classification accuracy as evaluated on single and multi-label classification tasks on real-world graphs such as DBLP, BlogCatalog, Cora and Wiki.
Although recent network embedding methods have a promising performance on the effectiveness of various applications, there are still some challenges since real-world graphs are massive in scale and this may obstruct the direct application of existing methods. On the other hand, when we consider a compressed or summary graph conserving the key structure and patterns of the original graph, many methods would be applicable to large graphs @cite_31 .
@cite_31
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Network embedding task aims at learning low-dimension latent representations of vertices while preserving the structure of a network simultaneously. Most existing network embedding methods mainly focus on static networks, which extract and condense the network information without temporal information. However, in the real world, networks keep evolving, where the linkage states between the same vertex pairs at consequential timestamps have very close correlations. In this paper, we propose to study the network embedding problem and focus on modeling the linkage evolution in the dynamic network setting. To address this problem, we propose a deep dynamic network embedding method. More specifically, the method utilizes the historical information obtained from the network snapshots at past timestamps to learn latent representations of the future network. In the proposed embedding method, the objective function is carefully designed to incorporate both the network internal and network dynamic transition structures. Extensive empirical experiments prove the effectiveness of the proposed model on various categories of real-world networks, including a human contact network, a bibliographic network, and e-mail networks. Furthermore, the experimental results also demonstrate the significant advantages of the method compared with both the state-of-the-art embedding techniques and several existing baseline methods.