Deep Representation Learning for Social Network Analysis

Social network analysis is an important problem in data mining. A fundamental step for analyzing social networks is to encode network data into low-dimensional representations, i.e., network embeddings, so that the network topology structure and other attribute information can be effectively preserved. Network representation leaning facilitates further applications such as classification, link prediction, anomaly detection, and clustering. In addition, techniques based on deep neural networks have attracted great interests over the past a few years. In this survey, we conduct a comprehensive review of the current literature in network representation learning, utilizing neural network models. First, we introduce the basic models for learning node representations in homogeneous networks. We will also introduce some extensions of the base models, tackling more complex scenarios such as analyzing attributed networks, heterogeneous networks, and dynamic networks. We then introduce techniques for embedding subgraphs and also present the applications of network representation learning. Finally, we discuss some promising research directions for future work.