BRIGHT: A Bridging Algorithm for Network Alignment

Multiple networks emerge in a wealth of high-impact applications. Network alignment, which aims to find the node correspondence across different networks, plays a fundamental role for many data mining tasks. Most of the existing methods can be divided into two categories: (1) consistency optimization based methods, which often explicitly assume the alignment to be consistent in terms of neighborhood topology and attribute across networks, and (2) network embedding based methods which learn low-dimensional node embedding vectors to infer alignment. In this paper, by analyzing representative methods of these two categories, we show that (1) the consistency optimization based methods are essentially specific random walk propagations from anchor links that might be too restrictive; (2) the embedding based methods no longer explicitly assume alignment consistency but inevitably suffer from the space disparity issue. To overcome these two limitations, we bridge these methods and propose a novel family of network alignment algorithms BRIGHT to handle both plain and attributed networks. Specifically, it constructs a space by random walk with restart (RWR) whose bases are one-hot encoding vectors of anchor nodes, followed by a shared linear layer. Our experiments on real-world networks show that the proposed family of algorithms BRIGHT outperform the state-of-the-arts for both plain and attributed network alignment tasks.