# A Comprehensive Survey of Graph Embedding: Problems, Techniques and Applications
- Author(s): Hongyun Cai, Vincent W. Zheng, and Kevin Chen-Chuan Chang
- Date: 2018
- Publication: # IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering
- [Link](https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/abstract/document/8294302)
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## The graph embedding problem
> Graph embeddings problems typically try to represent a graph as a low dimensional vector while preserving the graph structure/information.
Graph embeddings problems are generally related to two types of problems:
1. *Graph analytics*: tries to mine useful information from graph data
2. *Representation learning*: obtains data representations in an attempt to extract useful information when building classifiers or other predictors
**Graph embedding lies in the overlap of the two problems and focuses on *learning the low dimensional representations.***
Challenges of graph embedding depend on the problem setting, which depends on the type of graph input you have and the type of graph output you desire.
### Definitions
An example graph.
![[graphEmbeddings_Review1.png]]
A **graph** $G = (V,E)$, where $v \in V$ is a node and $e \in E$ is and edge.
The authors make distinctions between the following types of graphs:
- *Homogenous graph*: All nodes belong to a single type of node class and all edges belong to a single type of edge class
- *Heterogenous graph*: A graph where there are either
gt; 1$ node type or gt; 1$ edge type
- *Knowledge graph*: A directed graph whose nodes are *entities* and edges are *subject-property-object* triple facts. Specifically, each edge forms a *(head entity, relation, tail entity)* — denoted as lt;h,r,t>$ — which indicates a relationship $r$ from entity $h$ to entity $t$ (see example below).
![[graphEmbedding_Review2.png]]
> A knowledge graph representation of the above would contain two triplets: lt;Alice,isFriendOf,Bob>$ and lt;Bob,isSupervisorOf,Chris>$
**First-order proximity**: the weight of an edge — $e_{ij}$ — between node $v_i$ and $v_j$; denoted as $s_{ij}^{(1)}$.
The first order proximity between
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#### Related
[[graph_embeddings]]