How Low Can You Go? Searching for the Intrinsic Dimensionality of Complex Networks using Metric Node Embeddings

Bibliographic Details
Title: How Low Can You Go? Searching for the Intrinsic Dimensionality of Complex Networks using Metric Node Embeddings
Authors: Nakis, Nikolaos, Holm, Niels Raunkjær, Fiehn, Andreas Lyhne, Mørup, Morten
Publication Year: 2025
Collection: Computer Science
Subject Terms: Computer Science - Machine Learning, Computer Science - Social and Information Networks
More Details: Low-dimensional embeddings are essential for machine learning tasks involving graphs, such as node classification, link prediction, community detection, network visualization, and network compression. Although recent studies have identified exact low-dimensional embeddings, the limits of the required embedding dimensions remain unclear. We presently prove that lower dimensional embeddings are possible when using Euclidean metric embeddings as opposed to vector-based Logistic PCA (LPCA) embeddings. In particular, we provide an efficient logarithmic search procedure for identifying the exact embedding dimension and demonstrate how metric embeddings enable inference of the exact embedding dimensions of large-scale networks by exploiting that the metric properties can be used to provide linearithmic scaling. Empirically, we show that our approach extracts substantially lower dimensional representations of networks than previously reported for small-sized networks. For the first time, we demonstrate that even large-scale networks can be effectively embedded in very low-dimensional spaces, and provide examples of scalable, exact reconstruction for graphs with up to a million nodes. Our approach highlights that the intrinsic dimensionality of networks is substantially lower than previously reported and provides a computationally efficient assessment of the exact embedding dimension also of large-scale networks. The surprisingly low dimensional representations achieved demonstrate that networks in general can be losslessly represented using very low dimensional feature spaces, which can be used to guide existing network analysis tasks from community detection and node classification to structure revealing exact network visualizations.
Comment: Published as a conference paper at ICLR 2025
Document Type: Working Paper
Access URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/2503.01723
Accession Number: edsarx.2503.01723
Database: arXiv
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