Learning universal network representation via link prediction by graph convolutional neural network

Network representation learning algorithms, which aim at automatically encoding graphs into low-dimensional vector representations with a variety of node similarity definitions, have a wide range of downstream applications. Most existing methods either have low accuracies in downstream tasks or a very limited application field, such as article classification in citation networks. In this paper, we propose a novel network representation method, named Link Prediction based Network Representation (LPNR), which generalizes the latest graph neural network and optimizes a carefully designed objective function that preserves linkage structures. LPNR can not only learn meaningful node representations that achieve competitive accuracy in node centrality measurement and community detection but also achieve high accuracy in the link prediction task. Experiments prove the effectiveness of LPNR on three real-world networks. With the mini-batch and fixed sampling strategy, LPNR can learn the embedding of large graphs in a few hours. © The author(s) 2021.