  Representation learning for graphs enables the application of standard
machine learning algorithms and data analysis tools to graph data. Replacing
discrete unordered objects such as graph nodes by real-valued vectors is at the
heart of many approaches to learning from graph data. Such vector
representations, or embeddings, capture the discrete relationships in the
original data by representing nodes as vectors in a high-dimensional space.
  In most applications graphs model the relationship between real-life objects
and often nodes contain valuable meta-information about the original objects.
While being a powerful machine learning tool, embeddings are not able to
preserve such node attributes. We address this shortcoming and consider the
problem of learning discrete node embeddings such that the coordinates of the
node vector representations are graph nodes. This opens the door to designing
interpretable machine learning algorithms for graphs as all attributes
originally present in the nodes are preserved.
  We present a framework for coordinated local graph neighborhood sampling
(COLOGNE) such that each node is represented by a fixed number of graph nodes,
together with their attributes. Individual samples are coordinated and they
preserve the similarity between node neighborhoods. We consider different
notions of similarity for which we design scalable algorithms. We show
theoretical results for all proposed algorithms. Experiments on benchmark
graphs evaluate the quality of the designed embeddings and demonstrate how the
proposed embeddings can be used in training interpretable machine learning
algorithms for graph data.
