CANE: community-aware network embedding via adversarial training

Network embedding aims to learn a low-dimensional representation vector for each node while preserving the inherent structural properties of the network, which could benefit various downstream mining tasks such as link prediction and node classification. Most existing works can be considered as generative models that approximate the underlying node connectivity distribution in the network, or as discriminate models that predict edge existence under a specific discriminative task. Although several recent works try to unify the two types of models with adversarial learning to improve the performance, they only consider the local pairwise connectivity between nodes. Higher-order structural information such as communities, which essentially reflects the global topology structure of the network, is largely ignored. To this end, we propose a novel framework called CANE to simultaneously learn the node representations and identify the network communities. The two tasks are integrated and mutually reinforce each other under a novel adversarial learning framework. Specifically, with the detected communities, CANE jointly minimizes the pairwise connectivity loss and the community assignment error to improve node representation learning. In turn, the learned node representations provide high-quality features to facilitate community detection. Experimental results on multiple real datasets demonstrate that CANE achieves substantial performance gains over state-of-the-art baselines in various applications including link prediction, node classification, recommendation, network visualization, and community detection.