  In this work we propose Lasagne, a methodology to learn locality and
structure aware graph node embeddings in an unsupervised way. In particular, we
show that the performance of existing random-walk based approaches depends
strongly on the structural properties of the graph, e.g., the size of the
graph, whether the graph has a flat or upward-sloping Network Community Profile
(NCP), whether the graph is expander-like, whether the classes of interest are
more k-core-like or more peripheral, etc. For larger graphs with flat NCPs that
are strongly expander-like, existing methods lead to random walks that expand
rapidly, touching many dissimilar nodes, thereby leading to lower-quality
vector representations that are less useful for downstream tasks. Rather than
relying on global random walks or neighbors within fixed hop distances, Lasagne
exploits strongly local Approximate Personalized PageRank stationary
distributions to more precisely engineer local information into node
embeddings. This leads, in particular, to more meaningful and more useful
vector representations of nodes in poorly-structured graphs. We show that
Lasagne leads to significant improvement in downstream multi-label
classification for larger graphs with flat NCPs, that it is comparable for
smaller graphs with upward-sloping NCPs, and that is comparable to existing
methods for link prediction tasks.
