Node Classification in Attributed Multiplex Networks Using Random Walk and Graph Convolutional Networks

Node classification, as a central task in the graph data analysis, has been studied extensively with network embedding technique for single-layer graph network. However, there are some obstacles when extending the single-layer network embedding technique to the attributed multiplex network. The classification of a given node in the attributed multiplex network must consider the network structure in different dimensions, as well as rich node attributes, and correlations among the different dimensions. Moreover, the distance node context information of a given node in each dimension will also affect the classification of the given node. In this study, a novel network embedding approach for the node classification of attributed multiplex networks using random walk and graph convolutional networks (AMRG) is proposed. A random walk network embedding technique was used to extract distant node information and the results are considered as pre-trained node features to be concatenated with the original node features inputted into the graph convolutional networks (GCNs) to learn node representations for each dimension. Besides, the consensus regularization is introduced to capture the similarities among different dimensions, and the learnable neural network parameters of GCNs for different dimensions are also constrained by the regularization mechanism to improve the correlations. As well as an attention mechanism is explored to infer the importance for a given node in different dimensions. Extensive experiments demonstrated that our proposed technique outperforms many competitive baselines on several real-world multiplex network datasets.