Interpretable Signed Link Prediction With Signed Infomax Hyperbolic Graph

Signed link prediction in social networks aims to reveal the underlying relationships (i.e., links) among users (i.e., nodes) given their existing positive and negative interactions observed. Most of the prior efforts are devoted to learning node embeddings with graph neural networks (GNNs), which preserve the signed network topology by message-passing along edges to facilitate the downstream link prediction task. Nevertheless, the existing graph-based approaches could hardly provide human-intelligible explanations for the following three questions: (1) which neighbors to aggregate, (2) which path to propagate along, and (3) which social theory to follow in the learning process. To answer the aforementioned questions, in this paper, we investigate how to reconcile the balance and status social rules with information theory and develop a unified framework, termed as Signed Infomax Hyperbolic Graph (SIHG). By maximizing the mutual information between edge polarities and node embeddings, one can identify the most representative neighboring nodes that support the inference of edge sign. Different from existing GNNs that could only group features of friends in the subspace, the proposed SIHG incorporates the signed attention module, which is also capable of pushing hostile users far away from each other to preserve the geometry of antagonism. The polarity of the learned edge attention maps, in turn, provides interpretations of the social theories used in each aggregation. In order to model high-order user relations and complex hierarchies, the node embeddings are projected and measured in a hyperbolic space with a lower distortion. Extensive experiments on four signed network benchmarks demonstrate that the proposed SIHG framework significantly outperforms the state-of-the-arts in signed link prediction.

Automated summary

Signed link prediction in social networks aims to reveal the underlying relationships (i.e., links) among users (i.e., nodes) given their existing interactions. Existing graph-based approaches lack human-intelligible explanations for key questions, and thus a new framework, SIHG, is proposed. SIHG incorporates a signed attention module to identify representative neighboring nodes and preserve the geometry of antagonism. Extensive experiments demonstrate that SIHG outperforms existing methods in signed link prediction.