Time-evolving relational classification and ensemble methods

Abstract

Relational networks often evolve over time by the addition, deletion, and changing of links, nodes, and attributes. However, accurately incorporating the full range of temporal dependencies into relational learning algorithms remains a challenge. We propose a novel framework for discovering temporal-relational representations for classification. The framework considers transformations over all the evolving relational components (attributes, edges, and nodes) in order to accurately incorporate temporal dependencies into relational models. Additionally, we propose temporal ensemble methods and demonstrate their effectiveness against traditional and relational ensembles on two real-world datasets. In all cases, the proposed temporal-relational models outperform competing models that ignore temporal information. © 2012 Springer-Verlag.