Semantic-aware Node Synthesis for Imbalanced Heterogeneous Information Networks

Heterogeneous graph neural networks (HGNNs) have exhibited exceptional efficacy in modeling the complex heterogeneity in heterogeneous information networks (HINs). The critical advantage of HGNNs is their ability to handle diverse node and edge types in HINs by extracting and utilizing the abundant semantic information for effective representation learning. As a widespread phenomenon in many real-world scenarios, the class-imbalance distribution in HINs creates a performance bottleneck for existing HGNNs. Apart from the node imbalance in quantity, the more crucial and distinctive challenge in HINs is semantic imbalance. Minority classes in HINs often lack diverse and sufficient neighbor nodes, resulting in biased and incomplete semantic information. This semantic imbalance further compounds the difficulty of accurately classifying minority nodes, leading to the performance degradation of HGNNs. However, existing remedies are either tailored for non-graph data or designed specifically for homogeneous graphs, thus overlooking the inherent semantic imbalance in HINs. To tackle the imbalance of minority classes and supplement their inadequate semantics, we present the first method for the semantic imbalance problem in imbalanced HINs named Semantic-aware Node Synthesis (SNS). By assessing the influence on minority classes, SNS adaptively selects the heterogeneous neighbor nodes and augments the network with synthetic nodes while preserving the minority semantics. In addition, we introduce two dedicated regularization approaches for HGNNs that explore the inter-type and intra-type information and constrain the representation of synthetic nodes from both semantic and class perspectives to effectively suppress the potential noises from synthetic nodes, facilitating more expressive embeddings for classification. The comprehensive experimental study demonstrates that SNS consistently outperforms existing methods in different benchmark datasets.