Multi-level discriminator based contrastive learning for multiplex networks

Graph embedding is a technique for obtaining low-dimensional representations of nodes across diverse networks, which may then be used for various downstream tasks and applications. When it applies to heterogeneous networks, it is hard to handle heterogeneous networks because they usually contain different types of nodes and edges with more semantic and structural information. Recently, contrastive learning has developed as the preferred strategy for dealing with unsupervised heterogeneous graph embedding to reduce the cost of human label annotation. However, most multi-view contrastive learning approaches calculate the model’s loss only based on the mutual dependence between the node representation and graph representation. These approaches ignore that both node attributes and node clustering contain discriminative content. To solve this issue, we propose a model called Multi-Level Discriminator-based Contrastive Learning for Multiplex Networks (MLDCL). This model adopts a multi-level multi-discriminator-based approach that can simultaneously learn the global-level structural information, node-level attribute information, and local-level clustering information. Moreover, an augmentation strategy in the contrast learning process from the spectral domain is proposed to improve the representation and discriminative ability of MLDCL. Numerous tests with node clustering and classification tasks on widely used datasets demonstrate the efficacy of the proposed approach.