Heterogeneous network link prediction based on network schema and cross-neighborhood attention

Heterogeneous network link prediction is a hot topic in the analysis of networks. It aims to predict missing links in the network by utilizing the rich semantic information present in the heterogeneous network, thereby enhancing the effectiveness of relevant data mining tasks. Existing heterogeneous network link prediction methods utilize meta-paths or meta-graphs to extract semantic information, heavily relying on the priori knowledge. This paper proposes a heterogeneous network link prediction based on network schema and cross-neighborhood attention method (HNLP-NSCA). The heterogeneous node features are projected into a shared latent vector space using fully connected layers. To resolve the issue of prior knowledge dependence on meta-path, the semantic information is extracted by using network schema structures uniquely in heterogeneous networks. Node features are extracted based on the relevant network schema instances, avoiding the problem of meta-path selection. The neighborhood interaction information of input node pairs is sensed via cross-neighborhood attention, strengthening the nonlinear mapping capability of the link prediction. The resulting cross-neighborhood interaction vectors are combined with the node feature vectors and fed into a multilayer perceptron for link prediction. Experimental results on four real-world datasets demonstrate that the proposed HNLP-NSCA mothed outperforms the baseline models.