  Representation learning provides new and powerful graph analytical approaches
and tools for the highly valued data science challenge of mining knowledge
graphs. Since previous graph analytical methods have mostly focused on
homogeneous graphs, an important current challenge is extending this
methodology for richly heterogeneous graphs and knowledge domains. The
biomedical sciences are such a domain, reflecting the complexity of biology,
with entities such as genes, proteins, drugs, diseases, and phenotypes, and
relationships such as gene co-expression, biochemical regulation, and
biomolecular inhibition or activation. Therefore, the semantics of edges and
nodes are critical for representation learning and knowledge discovery in real
world biomedical problems. In this paper, we propose the edge2vec model, which
represents graphs considering edge semantics. An edge-type transition matrix is
trained by an Expectation-Maximization approach, and a stochastic gradient
descent model is employed to learn node embedding on a heterogeneous graph via
the trained transition matrix. edge2vec is validated on three biomedical domain
tasks: biomedical entity classification, compound-gene bioactivity prediction,
and biomedical information retrieval. Results show that by considering
edge-types into node embedding learning in heterogeneous graphs,
\textbf{edge2vec}\ significantly outperforms state-of-the-art models on all
three tasks. We propose this method for its added value relative to existing
graph analytical methodology, and in the real world context of biomedical
knowledge discovery applicability.
