Co-embedding network nodes and hierarchical labels with taxonomy based generative adversarial networks

Network embedding aims at transferring node proximity in networks into distributed vectors, which can be leveraged in various downstream applications. Recent research has shown that nodes in a network can often be organized in latent hierarchical structures, but without a particular underlying taxonomy, the learned node embedding is less useful nor interpretable. In this work, we aim to improve network embedding by modeling the conditional node proximity in networks indicated by node labels residing in real taxonomies. In the meantime, we also aim to model the hierarchical label proximity in the given taxonomies, which is too coarse by solely looking at the hierarchical topologies. To this end, we propose TaxoGAN to co-embed network nodes and hierarchical labels, through a hierarchical network generation process. Particularly, TaxoGAN models the child labels and network nodes of each parent label in an individual embedding space while learning to transfer network proximity among the spaces of hierarchical labels through stacked network generators and embedding encoders. To enable robust and efficient model inference, we further develop a hierarchical adversarial training process. Comprehensive experiments and case studies on four real-world datasets of networks with hierarchical labels demonstrate the utility of TaxoGAN in improving network embedding on traditional tasks of node classification and link prediction, as well as novel tasks like conditional proximity search and fine-grained taxonomy layout.