HeteClass: A Meta-path based framework for transductive classification of objects in heterogeneous information networks

Transductive classification using labeled and unlabeled objects in a heterogeneous information network for knowledge extraction is an interesting and challenging problem. Most of the real-world networks are heterogeneous in their natural setting and traditional methods of classification for homogeneous networks are not suitable for heterogeneous networks. In a heterogeneous network, various meta-paths connecting objects of the target type, on which classification is to be performed, make the classification task more challenging. The semantic of each meta-path would lead to the different accuracy of classification. Therefore, weight learning of meta-paths is required to leverage their semantics simultaneously by a weighted combination. In this work, we propose a novel meta-path based framework, HeteClass, for transductive classification of target type objects. HeteClass explores the network schema of the given network and can also incorporate the knowledge of the domain expert to generate a set of meta-paths. The regularization based weight learning method proposed in HeteClass is effective to compute the weights of symmetric as well as asymmetric meta-paths in the network, and the weights generated are consistent with the real-world understanding. Using the learned weights, a homogeneous information network is formed on target type objects by the weighted combination, and transductive classification is performed. The proposed framework HeteClass is flexible to utilize any suitable classification algorithm for transductive classification and can be applied on heterogeneous information networks with arbitrary network schema. Experimental results show the effectiveness of the HeteClass for classification of unlabeled objects in heterogeneous information networks using real-world data sets.