Graph Representation Learning Based on Cognitive Spreading Activations

Graph representation learning is an emerging area for graph analysis and inference. However, existing approaches for large-scale graphs either sample nodes in sequential walks or manipulate the adjacency matrices of graphs. The former approach can cause sampling bias against less-connected nodes, whereas the latter may suffer from sparsity that exists in many real-world graphs. To learn from structural information in a graph more efficiently and comprehensively, this paper proposes a new graph representation learning approach inspired by the cognitive model of spreading-activation mechanisms in human memory. This approach learns node embeddings by adopting a graph activation model that allows nodes to “activate” their neighbors and spread their own structural information to other nodes through the paths simultaneously. Comprehensive experiments demonstrate that the proposed model performs better than existing methods on several empirical datasets for multiple graph inference tasks. Meanwhile, the spreading-activation-based model is computationally more efficient than existing approaches–the training process converges after only a small number of iterations, and the training time is linear in the number of edges in a graph. The proposed method works for both homogeneous and heterogeneous graphs.