Motif-preserving temporal network embedding

Abstract

Network embedding, mapping nodes in a network to a low-dimensional space, achieves powerful performance. An increasing number of works focus on static network embedding, however, seldom attention has been paid to temporal network embedding, especially without considering the effect of mesoscopic dynamics when the network evolves. In light of this, we concentrate on a particular motif - triad - and its temporal dynamics, to study the temporal network embedding. Specifically, we propose MTNE, a novel embedding model for temporal networks. MTNE not only integrates the Hawkes process to stimulate the triad evolution process that preserves motif-aware high-order proximities, but also combines attention mechanism to distinguish the importance of different types of triads better. Experiments on various real-world temporal networks demonstrate that, compared with several state-of-the-art methods, our model achieves the best performance in both static and dynamic tasks, including node classification, link prediction, and link recommendation.