Sparse representation for heterogeneous information networks

A complex network is a fundamental tool to describe real-world complex systems, with most real-world systems containing multiple object types and relationships that can be described as heterogeneous infor-mation networks. However, with the increasing network complexity, understanding the complex pat-terns and finding the meta paths or meta-structures of the heterogeneous information networks has become challenging. This paper proposes a sparse representation for heterogeneous information net-works and extracts the heterogeneous information atoms that describe the basic connection pattern of the original heterogeneous information network. The heterogeneous information atoms help extract the main meta-paths or meta-structures and understand the complex patterns of the original heteroge-neous information network. Furthermore, the heterogeneous information networks can be decomposed, dimension-reduced, and reconstructed through the heterogeneous information atoms. Extensive exper-imental results demonstrate that heterogeneous information atoms and sparse coding represent the basic connection pattern of real-world heterogeneous information networks. Indeed, the developed method can reconstruct a network with a recovery exceeding 90%. (c) 2023 The Author(s). Published by Elsevier B.V. This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/).