Defining and Discovering Hyper-meta-paths for Heterogeneous Hypergraphs

Heterogeneous hypergraph is a kind of structural data that contains multiple types of nodes and multiple types of hyperedges. Each hyperedge type corresponds to a specific multi-ary relation (called hyper-relation) among subsets of nodes, which goes beyond traditional pair-wise relations in simple graphs. Existing representation learning methods for heterogeneous hypergraphs typically learn embeddings for nodes and hyperedges based on graph neural networks. Although achieving promising performance, they are still limited in capturing more complex structural features and richer semantics conveyed by the composition of various hyper-relations. To fill this research gap, in this work, we propose the concept of hyper-meta-path for heterogeneous hypergraphs, which is defined as the composition of a sequence of hyper-relations. Besides, we design an attention-based heterogeneous hypergraph neural network (HHNN) to automatically learn the importance of hyper-meta-paths. By exploiting useful ones, HHNN is able to capture more complex structural features to boost the model's performance, as well as leverage their conveyed semantics to improve the model's interpretability. Extensive experiments show that HHNN can achieve significantly better performance than state-of-the-art baselines, and the discovered hyper-meta-paths bring good interpretability for the model predictions. To facilitate the reproducibility of this work, we provide our dataset as well as anonymized source code at: https://github.com/zhengziyu77/HHNN.