Graph embeddings have become a key and widely used technique within the field of graph mining, proving to be successful across a broad range of domains including social, citation, transportation and biological. Graph embedding techniques aim to automatically create a low-dimensional representation of a given graph, which captures key structural elements in the resulting embedding space. However, to date, there has been little work exploring exactly which topological structures are being learned in the embeddings process. In this paper, we investigate if graph embeddings are approximating something analogous with traditional vertex level graph features. If such a relationship can be found, it could be used to provide a theoretical insight into how graph embedding approaches function. We perform this investigation by predicting known topological features, using supervised and unsupervised methods, directly from the embedding space. If a mapping between the embeddings and topological features can be found, then we argue that the structural information encapsulated by the features is represented in the embedding space. To explore this, we present extensive experimental evaluation from five state-of-the-art unsupervised graph embedding techniques, across a range of empirical graph datasets, measuring a selection of topological features. We demonstrate that several topological features are indeed being approximated by the embedding space, allowing key insight into how graph embeddings create good representations.

本文研究图嵌入是否近似于传统的顶点层面图特征，通过从嵌入空间直接预测已知的拓扑特征，使用监督和无监督方法，并通过对五种最先进的无监督图嵌入技术进行广泛的实验评估，测量一系列拓扑特征，我们证明了嵌入空间确实近似了几个拓扑特征，从而提供了关于图嵌入如何创建好表示的关键的洞见。

探究无监督图嵌入的语义内容：一项实证研究