Heterogeneous Information Network (HIN) has attracted much attention due to its wide applicability in a variety of data mining tasks, especially for tasks with multi-typed objects. A potentially large number of meta-paths can be extracted from the heterogeneous networks, providing abundant semantic knowledge. Though a variety of meta-paths can be defined, too many meta-paths are redundant. Reduction on the number of meta-paths can enhance the effectiveness since some redundant meta-paths provide interferential linkage to the task. Moreover, the reduced meta-paths can reflect the characteristic of the heterogeneous network. Previous endeavors try to reduce the number of meta-paths under the guidance of supervision information. Nevertheless, supervised information is expensive and may not always be available. In this paper, we propose a novel algorithm, SPMR (Semantic Preserving Meta-path Reduction), to reduce a set of pre-defined meta-paths in an unsupervised setting. The proposed method is able to evaluate a set of meta-paths to maximally preserve the semantics of original meta-paths after reduction. Experimental results show that SPMR can select a succinct subset of meta-paths which can achieve comparable or even better performance with fewer meta-paths.
Semi-supervised clustering on information networks combines both the labeled and unlabeled data sets with an aim to improve the clustering performance. However, the existing semi-supervised clustering methods are all designed for homogeneous networks and do not deal with heterogeneous ones. In this work, we propose a semi-supervised clustering approach to analyze heterogeneous information networks, which include multi-typed objects and links and may contain more useful semantic information. The major challenge in the clustering task here is how to handle multi-relations and diverse semantic meanings in heterogeneous networks. In order to deal with this challenge, we introduce the concept of relation-path to measure the similarity between two data objects of the same type. Thereafter, we make use of the labeled information to extract different weights for all relation-paths. Finally, we propose SemiRPClus, a complete framework for semi-supervised learning in heterogeneous networks. Experimental results demonstrate the distinct advantages in effectiveness and efficiency of our framework in comparison with the baseline and some state-of-the-art approaches. Real-world, multiple-typed objects are often interconnected, forming heterogeneous information networks. A major challenge for link-based clustering in such networks is its potential to generate many different results, carrying rather diverse semantic meanings. In order to generate desired clustering, we propose to use meta-path, a path that connects object types via a sequence of relations, to control clustering with distinct semantics. Nevertheless, it is easier for a user to provide a few examples ("seeds") than a weighted combination of sophisticated meta-paths to specify her clustering preference. Thus, we propose to integrate meta-path selection with user-guided clustering to cluster objects in networks, where a user first provides a small set of object seeds for each cluster as guidance. Then the system learns the weights for each meta-path that are consistent with the clustering result implied by the guidance, and generates clusters under the learned weights of meta-paths. A probabilistic approach is proposed to solve the problem, and an effective and efficient iterative algorithm, PathSelClus, is proposed to learn the model, where the clustering quality and the meta-path weights are mutually enhancing each other. Our experiments with several clustering tasks in two real networks demonstrate the power of the algorithm in comparison with the baselines.