Real-world physical and abstract data objects are interconnected, forming gigantic, interconnected networks. By structuring these data objects and interactions between these objects into multiple types, such networks become semi-structured heterogeneous information networks. Most real-world applications that handle big data, including interconnected social media and social networks, scientific, engineering, or medical information systems, online e-commerce systems, and most database systems, can be structured into heterogeneous information networks. Therefore, effective analysis of large-scale heterogeneous information networks poses an interesting but critical challenge.

In this book, we investigate the principles and methodologies of mining heterogeneous information networks. Departing from many existing network models that view interconnected data as homogeneous graphs or networks, our semi-structured heterogeneous information network model leverages the rich semantics of typed nodes and links in a network and uncovers surprisingly rich knowledge from the network. This semi-structured heterogeneous network modeling leads to a series of new principles and powerful methodologies for mining interconnected data, including: (1) rank-based clustering and classification; (2) meta-path-based similarity search and mining; (3) relation strength-aware mining, and many other potential developments. This book introduces this new research frontier and points out some promising research directions.

Table of Contents: Introduction / Ranking-Based Clustering / Classification of Heterogeneous Information Networks / Meta-Path-Based Similarity Search / Meta-Path-Based Relationship Prediction / Relation Strength-Aware Clustering with Incomplete Attributes / User-Guided Clustering via Meta-Path Selection / Research Frontiers

Yizhou Sun received her Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 2012. She will be an assistant professor in the College of Computer and Information Science at Northeastern University. Her principal research interest is in mining information and social networks, and more generally in data mining, database systems, statistics, machine learning, information retrieval, and network science, with a focus on modeling novel problems and proposing scalable algorithms for large-scale, real world applications. Yizhou has over 30 publications in books, journals, and major conferences. Tutorials based on her thesis work on mining heterogeneous information networks have been given in several premier conferences, including EDBT 2009, SIGMOD 2010, KDD 2010, ICDE 2012, VLDB 2012, and ASONAM 2012. She received ACM KDD 2012 Best Student Paper Award.

Jiawei Han is the Abel Bliss Professor of Computer Science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. His research includes data mining, information network analysis, database sys-tems, and data warehousing, with over 600 journal and confer-ence publications. He has chaired or served on many program committees of international conferences, including PC co-chair for KDD, SDM, and ICDM conferences, and Americas Coor-dinator for VLDB conferences. He also served as the founding Editor-In-Chief of ACM Transactions on Knowledge Discovery from Data and is serving as the Director of Information Network Academic Research Center supported by U.S. Army Research Lab. He is Fellow of ACM and Fellow of IEEE, and received 2004 ACM SIGKDD Innovations Award, 2005 IEEE Computer Society Technical Achievement Award, 2009 IEEE Computer So-ciety Wallace McDowell Award, and 2011 Daniel C. Drucker Eminent Faculty Award at UIUC. His book,Data Mining: Concepts and Techniques, has been used popularly as a textbook worldwide.