Learning Network Representations with Disentangled Graph Auto-Encoder
This addresses the challenge of explaining learned representations in graph analysis tasks, though it appears incremental as it builds on existing graph auto-encoder frameworks.
The paper tackles the problem of learning disentangled graph representations, which existing graph auto-encoders neglect, by proposing Disentangled Graph Auto-Encoder (DGA) and Disentangled Variational Graph Auto-Encoder (DVGA) methods. The result shows superiority over state-of-the-art baselines on synthetic and real-world datasets.
The (variational) graph auto-encoder is widely used to learn representations for graph-structured data. However, the formation of real-world graphs is a complicated and heterogeneous process influenced by latent factors. Existing encoders are fundamentally holistic, neglecting the entanglement of latent factors. This reduces the effectiveness of graph analysis tasks, while also making it more difficult to explain the learned representations. As a result, learning disentangled graph representations with the (variational) graph auto-encoder poses significant challenges and remains largely unexplored in the current research. In this paper, we introduce the Disentangled Graph Auto-Encoder (DGA) and the Disentangled Variational Graph Auto-Encoder (DVGA) to learn disentangled representations. Specifically, we first design a disentangled graph convolutional network with multi-channel message-passing layers to serve as the encoder. This allows each channel to aggregate information about each latent factor. The disentangled variational graph auto-encoder's expressive capability is then enhanced by applying a component-wise flow to each channel. In addition, we construct a factor-wise decoder that takes into account the characteristics of disentangled representations. We improve the independence of representations by imposing independence constraints on the mapping channels for distinct latent factors. Empirical experiments on both synthetic and real-world datasets demonstrate the superiority of our proposed method compared to several state-of-the-art baselines.