Role-Based Graph Embeddings

Random walks are at the heart of many existing node embedding and network representation learning methods. However, such methods have many limitations that arise from the use of traditional random walks, e.g., the embeddings resulting from these methods capture proximity (communities) among the vertices as opposed to structural similarity (roles). Furthermore, the embeddings are unable to transfer to new nodes and graphs as they are tied to node identity. To overcome these limitations, we introduce the Role2Vec framework based on the proposed notion of attributed random walks to learn structural role-based embeddings. Notably, the framework serves as a basis for generalizing any walk-based method. The Role2Vec framework enables these methods to be more widely applicable by learning inductive functions that capture the structural roles in the graph. Furthermore, the original methods are recovered as a special case of the framework when each vertex is mapped to its own function that uniquely identifies it. Finally, the Role2Vec framework is shown to be effective with an average AUC improvement of 17.8 percent for link prediction while requiring on average 853x less space than existing methods on a variety of graphs from different domains.