Exploiting Relational Information in Social Networks using Geometric Deep Learning on Hypergraphs

Online social networks are constituted by a diverse set of entities including users, images and posts which makes the task of predicting interdependencies between entities challenging. We need a model that transfers information from a given type of relations between entities to predict other types of relations, irrespective of the type of entity. In order to devise a generic framework, one needs to capture the relational information between entities without any entity dependent information. However, there are two challenges: (a) a social network has an intrinsic community structure. In these communities, some relations are much more complicated than pairwise relations, thus cannot be simply modeled by a graph; (b) there are different types of entities and relations in a social network, taking into account all of them makes it difficult to formulate a model. In this paper, we claim that representing social networks using hypergraphs improves the task of predicting missing information about an entity by capturing higher-order relations. We study the behavior of our method by performing experiments on CLEF dataset consisting of images from Flickr, an online photo sharing social network.