Section: Research Program

Beyond Homophilic Relationships

In many cases, algorithms for solving node classification problems are driven by the following assumption: linked entities tend to be assigned to the same class. This assumption, in the context of social networks, is known as homophily ( [29], [39]) and involves ties of every type, including friendship, work, marriage, age, gender, and so on. In social networks, homophily naturally implies that a set of individuals can be parted into subpopulations that are more cohesive. In fact, the presence of homogeneous groups sharing common interests is a key reason for affinity among interconnected individuals, which suggests that, in spite of its simplicity, this principle turns out to be very powerful for node classification problems in general networks.

Recently, however, researchers have started to consider networked data where connections may also carry a negative meaning. For instance, disapproval or distrust in social networks, negative endorsements on the Web. Although the introduction of signs on graph edges appears like a small change from standard weighted graphs, the resulting mathematical model, called signed graphs, has an unexpectedly rich additional complexity. For example, their spectral properties, which essentially all sophisticated node classification algorithms rely on, are different and less known than those of graphs. Signed graphs naturally lead to a specific inference problem that we have discussed in previous sections: link classification. This is the problem of predicting signs of links in a given graph. In online social networks, this may be viewed as a form of sentiment analysis, since we would like to semantically categorize the relationships between individuals.

Another way to go beyond homophily between entities will be studied using our recent model of hypergraphs with bipartite hyperedges [41]. A bipartite hyperedge connects two ends which are disjoint subsets of nodes. Bipartite hyperedges is a way to relate two collections of (possibly heterogeneous) entities represented by nodes. In the NLP setting, while hyperedges can be used to model bags of words, bipartite hyperedges are associated with relationships between bags of words. But each end of bipartite hyperedges is also a way to represent complex entities, gathering several attribute values (nodes) into hyperedges viewed as records. Our hypergraph notion naturally extends directed and undirected weighted graph. We have defined a spectral theory for this new class of hypergraphs and opened a way to smooth labeling on sets of nodes. The weighting scheme allows to weigh the participation of each node to the relationship modeled by bipartite hyperedges accordingly to an equilibrium condition. This condition provides a competition between nodes in hyperedges and allows interesting modeling properties that go beyond homophily and similarity over nodes (the theoretical analysis of our hypergraphs exhibits tight relationships with signed graphs). Following this competition idea, bipartite hyperedges are like matches between two teams and examples of applications are team creation. The basic tasks we are interested in are hyperedge classification, hyperedge prediction, node weight prediction. Finally, hypergraphs also represent a way to summarize or compress large graphs in which there exists highly connected couples of (large) subsets of nodes.