Dynamic Network Embedding via Temporal Path Adjacency Matrix Factorization

Zhuoming Li, Darong Lai

Abstract: Network embedding has been widely investigated to learn low dimensional nodes representation of networks, and serves for many downstream machine learning tasks. Previous network embedding studies mainly focus on static networks, and cannot adapt well to the characteristics of dynamic networks which are evolving over time. Some works on dynamic network embedding have tried to improve the computation efficiency for incremental updates of embedding vectors, while others have made efforts to utilize temporal information to enhance the quality of embedding vectors. However, few existing works can fulfill both efficiency and quality requirements. In this article, a novel dynamic network embedding model named TPANE (Temporal Path Adjacency Matrix based Network Embedding) is proposed. It employs a new network proximity measure: Temporal Path Adjacency, which is capable of capturing the temporal dependency between edges as well as being incrementally computed in an efficient way. It evaluates the similarity between nodes via the count of temporal paths between them, rather than making random sampling approximation, and adopts matrix factorization to obtain embedding vectors. Link prediction experiments on various real-world dynamic networks have been conducted to show the superior performance of TPANE against other state-of-the-art methods. Time consumption analysis also shows that TPANE is more efficient in incremental updates.