Network Embedding

Network embedding is a family of representation-learning methods that map each node of a graph into a dense, low-dimensional vector while preserving the network's structural properties. The approach was formalised for social-network data by Perozzi, Al-Rfou, and Skiena with DeepWalk (2014), which adapted the Word2Vec skip-gram model to random walks on graphs, and extended by Grover and Leskovec with Node2Vec (2016), which introduced a biased random walk that balances breadth-first and depth-first exploration. These embeddings turn relational data into feature vectors that standard machine-learning classifiers and clustering algorithms can consume directly.