Streaming Network Embedding through Local Actions

Recently, considerable research attention has been paid to network embedding, a popular approach to construct feature vectors of vertices. Due to the curse of dimensionality and sparsity in graphical datasets, this approach has become indispensable for machine learning tasks over large networks. The majority of existing literature has considered this technique under the assumption that the network is static. However, networks in many applications, nodes and edges accrue to a growing network as a streaming. A small number of very recent results have addressed the problem of embedding for dynamic networks. However, they either rely on knowledge of vertex attributes, suffer high-time complexity or need to be re-trained without closed-form expression. Thus the approach of adapting the existing methods to the streaming environment faces non-trivial technical challenges. These challenges motivate developing new approaches to the problems of streaming network embedding. In this paper, We propose a new framework that is able to generate latent features for new vertices with high efficiency and low complexity under specified iteration rounds. We formulate a constrained optimization problem for the modification of the representation resulting from a stream arrival. We show this problem has no closed-form solution and instead develop an online approximation solution. Our solution follows three steps: (1) identify vertices affected by new vertices, (2) generate latent features for new vertices, and (3) update the latent features of the most affected vertices. The generated representations are provably feasible and not far from the optimal ones in terms of expectation. Multi-class classification and clustering on five real-world networks demonstrate that our model can efficiently update vertex representations and simultaneously achieve comparable or even better performance.