Random walks are at the heart of many existing network embedding methods. However, such algorithms have many limitations that arise from the use of random walks, e.g., the features resulting from these methods are unable to transfer to new nodes and graphs as they are tied to vertex identity. In this work, we introduce the Role2Vec framework which uses the flexible notion of attributed random walks, and serves as a basis for generalizing existing methods such as DeepWalk, node2vec, and many others that leverage random walks. Our proposed framework enables these methods to be more widely applicable for both transductive and inductive learning as well as for use on graphs with attributes (if available). This is achieved by learning functions that generalize to new nodes and graphs. We show that our proposed framework is effective with an average AUC improvement of 16.55% while requiring on average 853x less space than existing methods on a variety of graphs.
Methods that learn representations of nodes in a graph play a critical role in network analysis since they enable many downstream learning tasks. We propose Graph2Gauss - an approach that can efficiently learn versatile node embeddings on large scale (attributed) graphs that show strong performance on tasks such as link prediction and node classification. Unlike most approaches that represent nodes as point vectors in a low-dimensional continuous space, we embed each node as a Gaussian distribution, allowing us to capture uncertainty about the representation. Furthermore, we propose an unsupervised method that handles inductive learning scenarios and is applicable to different types of graphs: plain/attributed, directed/undirected. By leveraging both the network structure and the associated node attributes, we are able to generalize to unseen nodes without additional training. To learn the embeddings we adopt a personalized ranking formulation w.r.t. the node distances that exploits the natural ordering of the nodes imposed by the network structure. Experiments on real world networks demonstrate the high performance of our approach, outperforming state-of-the-art network embedding methods on several different tasks. Additionally, we demonstrate the benefits of modeling uncertainty - by analyzing it we can estimate neighborhood diversity and detect the intrinsic latent dimensionality of a graph.