Entropy-Aware Time-Varying Graph Neural Networks with Generalized Temporal Hawkes Process: Dynamic Link Prediction in the Presence of Node Addition and Deletion

Bahareh Najafi, Saeedeh Parsaeefard, Alberto Leon-Garcia

This paper addresses the problem of learning temporal graph representations, which capture the changing nature of complex evolving networks. Existing approaches mainly focus on adding new nodes and edges to capture dynamic graph structures. However, to achieve more accurate representation of graph evolution, we consider both the addition and deletion of nodes and edges as events. These events occur at irregular time scales and are modeled using temporal point processes. Our goal is to learn the conditional intensity function of the temporal point process to investigate the influence of deletion events on node representation learning for link-level prediction. We incorporate network entropy, a measure of node and edge significance, to capture the effect of node deletion and edge removal in our framework. Additionally, we leveraged the characteristics of a generalized temporal Hawkes process, which considers the inhibitory effects of events where past occurrences can reduce future intensity. This framework enables dynamic representation learning by effectively modeling both addition and deletion events in the temporal graph. To evaluate our approach, we utilize autonomous system graphs, a family of inhomogeneous sparse graphs with instances of node and edge additions and deletions, in a link prediction task. By integrating these enhancements into our framework, we improve the accuracy of dynamic link prediction and enable better understanding of the dynamic evolution of complex networks.