Learning Heterogeneous Graph Embedding with Metapath-Based Aggregation for Link Prediction

Along with the growth of graph neural networks (GNNs), many researchers have adopted metapath-based GNNs to handle complex heterogeneous graph embedding. The conventional definition of a metapath only distinguishes whether there is a connection between nodes in the network schema, where the type of edge is ignored. This leads to inaccurate node representation and subsequently results in suboptimal prediction performance. In heterogeneous graphs, a node can be connected by multiple types of edges. In fact, each type of edge represents one kind of scene. The intuition is that if the embedding of nodes is trained under different scenes, the complete representation of nodes can be obtained by organically combining them. In this paper, we propose a novel definition of a metapath whereby the edge type, i.e., the relation between nodes, is integrated into it. A heterogeneous graph can be considered as the compound of multiple relation subgraphs from the view of a novel metapath. In different subgraphs, the embeddings of a node are separately trained by encoding and aggregating the neighbors of the intrapaths, which are the instance levels of a novel metapath. Then, the final embedding of the node is obtained by the use of the attention mechanism which aggregates nodes from the interpaths, which is the semantic level of the novel metapaths. Link prediction is a downstream task by which to evaluate the effectiveness of the learned embeddings. We conduct extensive experiments on three real-world heterogeneous graph datasets for link prediction. The empirical results show that the proposed model outperforms the state-of-the-art baselines; in particular, when comparing it to the best baseline, the F1 metric is increased by 10.35% over an Alibaba dataset