Comparative analysis of similarity measures in Heterogeneous Information Network

Information network derived from various domains are studied recently. Searching for Similarity is a major task into such types Information Network. Lot of research on computing similar objects is done in Homogeneous Information Network. But real world scenario can be described easily by Heterogeneous Information Network (HIN) which consists of different types of entities and relationship among them. Due to multiple type of entities and links between them in HIN, it is necessary to find the similarities between the nodes of HIN. In Homogeneous Information Network, there is only single type of node and links in between them. There are many existing methods by which similarity among the nodes of Homogeneous Information Network can be calculated. But those methods cannot be applied for the HIN because semantic meaning behind each path cannot be considered. If we want to apply techniques of Homogeneous Information Network on HIN then we need to project HIN into Homogeneous Information Network which causes loss of Information. So there is a need to apply different techniques or similarity measures on HIN to calculate the similarities between nodes in HIN. There are many similarity measures implemented by researchers for HIN. Similarity search basically concentrates on discovering the most similarity objects for a given query entity. In a comparative analysis section, we have discussed some of the measures used for similarity.