Continuous Temporal Graph Networks for Event-Based Graph Data

Jin Guo, Zhen Han, su zhou, Jiliang Li, Volker Tresp, Yuyi Wang

Keywords: dynamic graph, link duration, continuous dynamics representation

TL;DR: We propose Continuous Temporal Graph Networks (CTGNs), which combine continuous dynamical systems with graph neural networks.

Abstract:

There has been an increasing interest in modeling continuous-time dynamics of temporal graph data.
Previous methods encode time-evolving relational information into a low-dimensional representation by specifying discrete layers of neural networks, while real-world dynamic graphs often vary continuously over time. Hence, we propose Continuous Temporal Graph Networks (CTGNs) to capture continuous dynamics of temporal graph data. We use both the link starting timestamps and link duration as evolving information to model continuous dynamics of nodes.
The key idea is to use neural ordinary differential equations (ODE) to characterize the continuous dynamics of node representations over dynamic graphs. We parameterize ordinary differential equations using a novel graph neural network. The existing dynamic graph networks can be considered as a specific discretization of CTGNs. Experiment results on both transductive and inductive tasks demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed approach over competitive baselines.