  Structural identity is a concept of symmetry in which network nodes are
identified according to the network structure and their relationship to other
nodes. Structural identity has been studied in theory and practice over the
past decades, but only recently has it been addressed with representational
learning techniques. This work presents struc2vec, a novel and flexible
framework for learning latent representations for the structural identity of
nodes. struc2vec uses a hierarchy to measure node similarity at different
scales, and constructs a multilayer graph to encode structural similarities and
generate structural context for nodes. Numerical experiments indicate that
state-of-the-art techniques for learning node representations fail in capturing
stronger notions of structural identity, while struc2vec exhibits much superior
performance in this task, as it overcomes limitations of prior approaches. As a
consequence, numerical experiments indicate that struc2vec improves performance
on classification tasks that depend more on structural identity.
