Network schema preserving heterogeneous information network embedding

As heterogeneous networks have become increasingly ubiquitous, Heterogeneous Information Network (HIN) embedding, aiming to project nodes into a low-dimensional space while preserving the heterogeneous structure, has drawn increasing attention in recent years. Many of the existing HIN embedding methods adopt meta-path guided random walk to retain both the semantics and structural correlations between different types of nodes. However, the selection of meta-paths is still an open problem, which either depends on domain knowledge or is learned from label information. As a uniform blueprint of HIN, the network schema comprehensively embraces the high-order structure and contains rich semantics. In this paper, we make the first attempt to study network schema preserving HIN embedding, and propose a novel model named NSHE. In NSHE, a network schema sampling method is first proposed to generate subgraphs (i.e., schema instances), and then multi-task learning task is built to preserve the heterogeneous structure of each schema instance. Besides preserving pairwise structure information, NSHE is able to retain high-order structure (i.e., network schema). Extensive experiments on three real-world datasets demonstrate that our proposed model NSHE significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art methods.