N2N: Network derivative mining

Network mining plays a pivotal role in many high-impact application domains, including information retrieval, healthcare, social network analysis, security and recommender systems. State-of-the-art offers a wealth of sophisticated network mining algorithms, many of which have been widely adopted in real-world with superior empirical performance. Nonetheless, they often lack effective and efficient ways to characterize how the results of a given mining task relate to the underlying network structure. In this paper, we introduce network derivative mining problem. Given the input network and a specific mining algorithm, network derivative mining finds a derivative network whose edges measure the influence of the corresponding edges of the input network on the mining results. We envision that network derivative mining could be beneficial in a variety of scenarios, ranging from explainable network mining, adversarial network mining, sensitivity analysis on network structure, active learning, learning with side information to counterfactual learning on networks. We propose a generic framework for network derivative mining from the optimization perspective and provide various instantiations for three classic network mining tasks, including ranking, clustering, and matrix completion. For each mining task, we develop effective algorithm for constructing the derivative network based on influence function analysis, with numerous optimizations to ensure a linear complexity in both time and space. Extensive experimental evaluation on real-world datasets demonstrates the efficacy of the proposed framework and algorithms.