Attributed network embedding with community preservation

Abstract

Network embedding (NE) is a method that maps nodes in a network into a low-dimensional and continuous vector space while maintains inherent features of the network. Most existing algorithms for NE focus on one or two of the aspects of topological structure, node attributes or community structure information, but without integrating the three in a unified framework. In this study, we develop a deep neural network-based framework for Attributed Network Embedding with Community Preservation (ANECP), which simultaneously incorporates the topological structure, node attributes as well as community structure together to obtain the low-dimensional distributed representations of nodes in the network. The use of deep neural networks captures the underlying high non-linearity in both topology and attribute information, while the incorporation of the community structure resolves the issues of data sparsity from microscopic perspective. Consequently, the obtained node representations can preserve proximity and discriminative. We conducted experimental studies using six real-world datasets. The experimental results show that proposed ANECP has superior performance over the existing methods.