Incomplete Network Alignment

Abstract

Networks are prevalent in many areas and are often collected from multiple sources. However, due to the veracity characteristics, more often than not, networks are incomplete. Network alignment and network completion have become two fundamental cornerstones behind a wealth of high-impact graph mining applications. The state-of-the-art have been addressing these two tasks in parallel . That is, most of the existing network alignment methods have implicitly assumed that the topology of the input networks for alignment are perfectly known a priori, whereas the existing network completion methods admit either a single network (i.e., matrix completion) or multiple aligned networks (e.g., tensor completion). In this article, we argue that network alignment and completion are inherently complementary with each other, and hence propose to jointly address them so that the two tasks can mutually benefit from each other. We formulate the problem from the optimization perspective, and propose an effective algorithm ( iNeAt ) to solve it. The proposed method offers two distinctive advantages. First ( Alignment accuracy ), our method benefits from the higher-quality input networks while mitigates the effect of the incorrectly inferred links introduced by the completion task itself. Second ( Alignment efficiency ), thanks to the low-rank structure of the complete networks and the alignment matrix, the alignment process can be significantly accelerated. We perform extensive experiments which show that (1) the network completion can significantly improve the alignment accuracy, i.e., up to 30% over the baseline methods; (2) the network alignment can in turn help recover more missing edges than the baseline methods; and (3) our method achieves a good balance between the running time and the accuracy, and scales with a provable linear complexity in both time and space.

Document Details

Document Type
Pub Defense Publication
Publication Date
May 30, 2020
Source ID
10.1145/3384203

Entities

People

  • Hanghang Tong
  • Jie Tang
  • Jiejun Xu
  • Si Zhang
  • Wei Fan

Organizations

  • Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency
  • HRL Laboratories
  • National Science Foundation
  • Tencent
  • Tsinghua University
  • United States Department of Homeland Security
  • University of Illinois Urbana–Champaign

Tags

Fields of Study

  • Computer science

Readers

  • Computer Networking
  • Distributed Systems and Data Platform Development
  • Systems Analysis and Design

Technology Areas

  • AI & ML
  • AI & ML - Machine Learning Algorithms
  • AI & ML - Neural Networks
  • Space