Multi-Task Network Representation Learning

Abstract

Networks, such as social networks, biochemical networks, and protein-protein interaction networks are ubiquitous in the real world. Network representation learning aims to embed nodes in a network as low-dimensional, dense, real-valued vectors, and facilitate downstream network analysis. The existing embedding methods commonly endeavor to capture structure information in a network, but lack of consideration of subsequent tasks and synergies between these tasks, which are of equal importance for learning desirable network representations. To address this issue, we propose a novel multi-task network representation learning (MTNRL) framework, which is end-to-end and more effective for underlying tasks. The original network and the incomplete network share a unified embedding layer followed by node classification and link prediction tasks that simultaneously perform on the embedding vectors. By optimizing the multi-task loss function, our framework jointly learns task-oriented embedding representations for each node. Besides, our framework is suitable for all network embedding methods, and the experiment results on several benchmark datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed framework compared with state-of-the-art methods.