  Network embedding aims to learn the low-dimensional representations of
vertexes in a network, while structure and inherent properties of the network
is preserved. Existing network embedding works primarily focus on preserving
the microscopic structure, such as the first- and second-order proximity of
vertexes, while the macroscopic scale-free property is largely ignored.
Scale-free property depicts the fact that vertex degrees follow a heavy-tailed
distribution (i.e., only a few vertexes have high degrees) and is a critical
property of real-world networks, such as social networks. In this paper, we
study the problem of learning representations for scale-free networks. We first
theoretically analyze the difficulty of embedding and reconstructing a
scale-free network in the Euclidean space, by converting our problem to the
sphere packing problem. Then, we propose the "degree penalty" principle for
designing scale-free property preserving network embedding algorithm: punishing
the proximity between high-degree vertexes. We introduce two implementations of
our principle by utilizing the spectral techniques and a skip-gram model
respectively. Extensive experiments on six datasets show that our algorithms
are able to not only reconstruct heavy-tailed distributed degree distribution,
but also outperform state-of-the-art embedding models in various network mining
tasks, such as vertex classification and link prediction.
