Task-Oriented Genetic Activation for Large-Scale Complex Heterogeneous Graph Embedding

The recent success of deep graph embedding innovates the graphical information characterization methodologies. However, in real-world applications, such a method still struggles with the challenges of heterogeneity, scalability, and multiplex. To address these challenges, in this study, we propose a novel solution, Genetic hEterogeneous gRaph eMbedding (GERM), which enables flexible and efficient task-driven vertex embedding in a complex heterogeneous graph. Unlike prior efforts for this track of studies, we employ a task-oriented genetic activation strategy to efficiently generate the “Edge Type Activated Vector” (ETAV) over the edge types in the graph. The generated ETAV can not only reduce the incompatible noise and navigate the heterogeneous graph random walk at the graph-schema level, but also activate an optimized subgraph for efficient representation learning. By revealing the correlation between the graph structure and task information, the model interpretability can be enhanced as well. Meanwhile, an activated heterogeneous skip-gram framework is proposed to encapsulate both topological and task-specific information of a given heterogeneous graph. Through extensive experiments on both scholarly and e-commerce datasets, we demonstrate the efficacy and scalability of the proposed methods via various search/recommendation tasks. GERM can significantly reduces the running time and remove expert-intervention without sacrificing the performance (or even modestly improve) by comparing with baselines.