DGE: Deep Generative Network Embedding Based on Commonality and Individuality

Network embedding plays a crucial role in network analysis to provide effective representations for a variety of learning tasks. Existing attributed network embedding methods mainly focus on preserving the observed node attributes and network topology in the latent embedding space, with the assumption that nodes connected through edges will share similar attributes. However, our empirical analysis of real-world datasets shows that there exist both commonality and individuality between node attributes and network topology. On the one hand, similar nodes are expected to share similar attributes and have edges connecting them (commonality). On the other hand, each information source may maintain individual differences as well (individuality). Simultaneously capturing commonality and individuality is very challenging due to their exclusive nature and existing work fail to do so. In this paper, we propose a deep generative embedding (DGE) framework which simultaneously captures commonality and individuality between network topology and node attributes in a generative process. Stochastic gradient variational Bayesian (SGVB) optimization is employed to infer model parameters as well as the node embeddings. Extensive experiments on four real-world datasets show the superiority of our proposed DGE framework in various tasks including node classification and link prediction.