Learning accurate neighborhood- and self-information for higher-order relation prediction in Heterogeneous Information Networks

Abstract

Heterogeneous Information Networks (HINs) are commonly employed to model complex real-world scenarios with diverse node and edge types. However, due to constraints in data collection and processing, constructed networks often lack certain relations. Consequently, various methods have emerged, particularly recently, leveraging heterogeneous graph neural networks (HGNNs) to predict missing relations. Nevertheless, these methods primarily focus on pairwise relations between two nodes. Real-world interactions, however, often involve multiple nodes and diverse types, extending beyond simple pairwise relations. For instance, academic collaboration networks may entail interactions among authors, papers, and conferences simultaneously. Despite their prevalence, higher-order relations are often overlooked. While HGNNs are effective at learning network structures, they may suffer from over-smoothing, resulting in similar representations for nodes and their neighbors. The learned inaccurate proximity among nodes impedes the discernment of higher-order relations. Furthermore, observed edges among a target group of nodes can provide valuable evidence for predicting higher-order relations. To address these challenges, we propose a novel model called Accurate Neighborhood- and Self-information Enhanced Heterogeneous Graph Neural Network (ANSE-HGN). Building upon HGNNs to encode network structure and attributes, we introduce a relation-based neighborhood encoder to capture information within multi-hop neighborhoods in heterogeneous higher-order relations. This enables the calculation of accurate proximity among target groups of nodes, thereby enhancing prediction accuracy. Additionally, we leverage self-information from observed higher-order relations as an auxiliary loss to reinforce the learning process. Extensive experiments on four real-world datasets demonstrate the superiority of our proposed method in higher-order relation prediction tasks.