arXiv subjects

Fragkiskos D. Malliaros

Publications and source records attributed to Fragkiskos D. Malliaros.

47 records · Page 3Linked to original sources

arXiv2022

Multiple Kernel Representation Learning on Networks

Learning representations of nodes in a low dimensional space is a crucial task with numerous interesting applications in network analysis, including link prediction, node classification, and visualization. Two popular approaches for this problem are matrix factorization and random walk-based models. In this paper, we aim to bring together the best of both worlds, towards learning node representations. In particular, we propose a weighted matrix factorization model that encodes random walk-based information about nodes of the network. The benefit of this novel formulation is that it enables us to utilize kernel functions without realizing the exact proximity matrix so that it enhances the expressiveness of existing matrix decomposition methods with kernels and alleviates their computational complexities. We extend the approach with a multiple kernel learning formulation that provides the flexibility of learning the kernel as the linear combination of a dictionary of kernels in data-driven fashion. We perform an empirical evaluation on real-world networks, showing that the proposed model outperforms baseline node embedding algorithms in downstream machine learning tasks.

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arXiv2021

Topic-aware latent models for representation learning on networks

Network representation learning (NRL) methods have received significant attention over the last years thanks to their success in several graph analysis problems, including node classification, link prediction, and clustering. Such methods aim to map each vertex of the network into a low-dimensional space in a way that the structural information of the network is preserved. Of particular interest are methods based on random walks; such methods transform the network into a collection of node sequences, aiming to learn node representations by predicting the context of each node within the sequence. In this paper, we introduce TNE, a generic framework to enhance the embeddings of nodes acquired by means of random walk-based approaches with topic-based information. Similar to the concept of topical word embeddings in Natural Language Processing, the proposed model first assigns each node to a latent community with the favor of various statistical graph models and community detection methods and then learns the enhanced topic-aware representations. We evaluate our methodology in two downstream tasks: node classification and link prediction. The experimental results demonstrate that by incorporating node and community embeddings, we are able to outperform widely-known baseline NRL models.

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arXiv2021

GraphSVX: Shapley Value Explanations for Graph Neural Networks

Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) achieve significant performance for various learning tasks on geometric data due to the incorporation of graph structure into the learning of node representations, which renders their comprehension challenging. In this paper, we first propose a unified framework satisfied by most existing GNN explainers. Then, we introduce GraphSVX, a post hoc local model-agnostic explanation method specifically designed for GNNs. GraphSVX is a decomposition technique that captures the "fair" contribution of each feature and node towards the explained prediction by constructing a surrogate model on a perturbed dataset. It extends to graphs and ultimately provides as explanation the Shapley Values from game theory. Experiments on real-world and synthetic datasets demonstrate that GraphSVX achieves state-of-the-art performance compared to baseline models while presenting core theoretical and human-centric properties.

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arXiv2020

Multi-task Learning for Influence Estimation and Maximization

We address the problem of influence maximization when the social network is accompanied by diffusion cascades. In prior works, such information is used to compute influence probabilities, which is utilized by stochastic diffusion models in influence maximization. Motivated by the recent criticism on the effectiveness of diffusion models as well as the galloping advancements in influence learning, we propose IMINFECTOR (Influence Maximization with INFluencer vECTORs), a unified approach that uses representations learned from diffusion cascades to perform model-independent influence maximization that scales in real-world datasets. The first part of our methodology is a multi-task neural network that learns embeddings of nodes that initiate cascades (influencer vectors) and embeddings of nodes that participate in them (susceptible vectors). The norm of an influencer vector captures the ability of the node to create lengthy cascades and is used to estimate the expected influence spread and reduce the number of candidate seeds. In addition, the combination of influencer and susceptible vectors form the diffusion probabilities between nodes. These are used to reformulate the network as a bipartite graph and propose a greedy solution to influence maximization that retains the theoretical guarantees.We a pply our method in three sizable networks with diffusion cascades and evaluate it using cascades from future time steps. IMINFECTOR is able to scale in all of them and outperforms various competitive algorithms and metrics from the diverse landscape of influence maximization in terms of efficiency and seed set quality.

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arXiv2019

Exponential Family Graph Embeddings

Representing networks in a low dimensional latent space is a crucial task with many interesting applications in graph learning problems, such as link prediction and node classification. A widely applied network representation learning paradigm is based on the combination of random walks for sampling context nodes and the traditional \textit{Skip-Gram} model to capture center-context node relationships. In this paper, we emphasize on exponential family distributions to capture rich interaction patterns between nodes in random walk sequences. We introduce the generic \textit{exponential family graph embedding} model, that generalizes random walk-based network representation learning techniques to exponential family conditional distributions. We study three particular instances of this model, analyzing their properties and showing their relationship to existing unsupervised learning models. Our experimental evaluation on real-world datasets demonstrates that the proposed techniques outperform well-known baseline methods in two downstream machine learning tasks.

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arXiv2019

Kernel Node Embeddings

Learning representations of nodes in a low dimensional space is a crucial task with many interesting applications in network analysis, including link prediction and node classification. Two popular approaches for this problem include matrix factorization and random walk-based models. In this paper, we aim to bring together the best of both worlds, towards learning latent node representations. In particular, we propose a weighted matrix factorization model which encodes random walk-based information about the nodes of the graph. The main benefit of this formulation is that it allows to utilize kernel functions on the computation of the embeddings. We perform an empirical evaluation on real-world networks, showing that the proposed model outperforms baseline node embedding algorithms in two downstream machine learning tasks.

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arXiv2019

Perturb and Combine to Identify Influential Spreaders in Real-World Networks

Some of the most effective influential spreader detection algorithms are unstable to small perturbations of the network structure. Inspired by bagging in Machine Learning, we propose the first Perturb and Combine (P&C) procedure for networks. It (1) creates many perturbed versions of a given graph, (2) applies a node scoring function separately to each graph, and (3) combines the results. Experiments conducted on real-world networks of various sizes with the k-core, generalized k-core, and PageRank algorithms reveal that P&C brings substantial improvements. Moreover, this performance boost can be obtained at almost no extra cost through parallelization. Finally, a bias-variance analysis suggests that P&C works mainly by reducing bias, and that therefore, it should be capable of improving the performance of all vertex scoring functions, including stable ones.

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arXiv2018

TNE: A Latent Model for Representation Learning on Networks

Network representation learning (NRL) methods aim to map each vertex into a low dimensional space by preserving the local and global structure of a given network, and in recent years they have received a significant attention thanks to their success in several challenging problems. Although various approaches have been proposed to compute node embeddings, many successful methods benefit from random walks in order to transform a given network into a collection of sequences of nodes and then they target to learn the representation of nodes by predicting the context of each vertex within the sequence. In this paper, we introduce a general framework to enhance the embeddings of nodes acquired by means of the random walk-based approaches. Similar to the notion of topical word embeddings in NLP, the proposed method assigns each vertex to a topic with the favor of various statistical models and community detection methods, and then generates the enhanced community representations. We evaluate our method on two downstream tasks: node classification and link prediction. The experimental results demonstrate that the incorporation of vertex and topic embeddings outperform widely-known baseline NRL methods.

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arXiv2018

BiasedWalk: Biased Sampling for Representation Learning on Graphs

Network embedding algorithms are able to learn latent feature representations of nodes, transforming networks into lower dimensional vector representations. Typical key applications, which have effectively been addressed using network embeddings, include link prediction, multilabel classification and community detection. In this paper, we propose BiasedWalk, a scalable, unsupervised feature learning algorithm that is based on biased random walks to sample context information about each node in the network. Our random-walk based sampling can behave as Breath-First-Search (BFS) and Depth-First-Search (DFS) samplings with the goal to capture homophily and role equivalence between the nodes in the network. We have performed a detailed experimental evaluation comparing the performance of the proposed algorithm against various baseline methods, on several datasets and learning tasks. The experiment results show that the proposed method outperforms the baseline ones in most of the tasks and datasets.

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arXiv2016

A k-core Decomposition Framework for Graph Clustering

Graph clustering or community detection constitutes an important task for investigating the internal structure of graphs, with a plethora of applications in several domains. Traditional techniques for graph clustering, such as spectral methods, typically suffer from high time and space complexity. In this article, we present CoreCluster, an efficient graph clustering framework based on the concept of graph degeneracy, that can be used along with any known graph clustering algorithm. Our approach capitalizes on processing the graph in an hierarchical manner provided by its core expansion sequence, an ordered partition of the graph into different levels according to the k-core decomposition. Such a partition provides an efficient way to process the graph in an incremental manner that preserves its clustering structure, while making the execution of the chosen clustering algorithm much faster due to the smaller size of the graph's partitions onto which the algorithm operates. An experimental analysis on a multitude of real and synthetic data demonstrates that our approach can be applied to any clustering algorithm accelerating the clustering process, while the quality of the clustering structure is preserved or even improved.

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arXiv2013

Clustering and Community Detection in Directed Networks: A Survey

Networks (or graphs) appear as dominant structures in diverse domains, including sociology, biology, neuroscience and computer science. In most of the aforementioned cases graphs are directed - in the sense that there is directionality on the edges, making the semantics of the edges non symmetric. An interesting feature that real networks present is the clustering or community structure property, under which the graph topology is organized into modules commonly called communities or clusters. The essence here is that nodes of the same community are highly similar while on the contrary, nodes across communities present low similarity. Revealing the underlying community structure of directed complex networks has become a crucial and interdisciplinary topic with a plethora of applications. Therefore, naturally there is a recent wealth of research production in the area of mining directed graphs - with clustering being the primary method and tool for community detection and evaluation. The goal of this paper is to offer an in-depth review of the methods presented so far for clustering directed networks along with the relevant necessary methodological background and also related applications. The survey commences by offering a concise review of the fundamental concepts and methodological base on which graph clustering algorithms capitalize on. Then we present the relevant work along two orthogonal classifications. The first one is mostly concerned with the methodological principles of the clustering algorithms, while the second one approaches the methods from the viewpoint regarding the properties of a good cluster in a directed network. Further, we present methods and metrics for evaluating graph clustering results, demonstrate interesting application domains and provide promising future research directions.

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