AngHNE: Representation Learning for Bipartite Heterogeneous Networks with Angular Loss

Real-world networks often show heterogeneity. A frequently encountered type is the bipartite heterogeneous structure, in which two types of nodes and three types of edges exist. Recently, much attention has been devoted to representation learning in these networks. One of the essential differences between heterogeneous and homogeneous learning is that the former structure requires methods to possess awareness to node and edge types. Most existing methods, including metapath-based, proximity-based and graph neural network-based, adopt inner product or vector norms to evaluate the similarities in embedding space. However, these measures either violates the triangle inequality, or show severe sensitivity to scaling transformation. The limitations often hinder the applicability to real-world problems. In view of this, in this paper, we propose a novel angle-based method for bipartite heterogeneous network representation. Specifically, we first construct training sets by generating quintuples, which contain both positive and negative samples from two different parts of networks. Then we analyze the quintuple-based problem from a geometry perspective, and transform the comparisons between preferred and non-preferred samples to the comparisons of angles. In addition, we utilize convolution modules to extract node features. A hinge loss, as the final objective, is proposed to relax the angular constraint for learning. Extensive experiments for two typical tasks show the efficacy of the proposed method, comparing with eight competitive methods.