Under consideration for publication in Knowledge and Information Systems Meta Path-Based Collective Classification in Heterogeneous Information Networks

Abstract. Collective classification has been intensively studied due to its impact in many important applications, such as web mining, bioinformatics and citation analysis. Collective classification approaches exploit the dependencies of a group of linked objects whose class labels are correlated and need to be predicted simultaneously. In this paper, we focus on studying the collective classification problem in heterogeneous networks, which involves multiple types of data objects interconnected by multiple types of links. Intuitively, two objects are correlated if they are linked by many paths in the network. However, most existing approaches measure the dependencies among objects through directly links or indirect links without considering the different semantic meanings behind different paths. In this paper, we study the collective classification problem taht is defined among the same type of objects in heterogenous networks. Moreover, by considering different linkage paths in the network, one can capture the subtlety of different types of dependencies among objects. We introduce the concept of meta-path based dependencies among objects, where a meta path is a path consisting a certain sequence of linke types. We show that the quality of collective classification results strongly depends upon the meta paths used. To accommodate the large network size, a novel solution, called Hcc (meta-path based Heterogenous Collective Classification), is developed to effectively assign labels to a group of instances that are interconnected through different meta-paths. The proposed Hcc model can capture different types of dependencies among objects with respect to different meta paths. Empirical studies on real-world networks demonstrate that effectiveness of the proposed meta path-based collective classification approach