Status-Aware Signed Heterogeneous Network Embedding With Graph Neural Networks

Many real-world applications are inherently modeled as signed heterogeneous networks or graphs with positive and negative links. Signed graph embedding embeds rich structural and semantic information of a signed graph into low-dimensional node representations. Existing methods usually exploit social structural balance theory to capture the semantics of the complex structure in a signed graph. These methods either omit the node features or may discard the direction information of the links. To address these issues, we propose a new framework, called a status-aware graph neural network (S-GNN), to boost the representation learning performance. S-GNN is equipped with a loss function designed based on status theory, a social-psychological theory specifically developed for directed signed graphs. Extensive experimental results on benchmarking datasets verified that S-GNN can distill comprehensive information ingrained in a signed graph in the embedding space. Specifically, S-GNN achieves state-of-the-art accuracy, robustness, and scalability: it speeds up the processing time of link sign prediction by up to 6.5 × and increases accuracy by up to 18.8% as compared with the alternatives. We also show that S-GNN can obtain effective status scores of nodes for link sign prediction and node ranking tasks, both of which yield state-of-the-art performance.