DyCSC: Modeling the Evolutionary Process of Dynamic Networks Based on Cluster Structure

Temporal networks are an important type of network whose topological structure changes over time. Compared with methods on static networks, temporal network embedding (TNE) methods are facing three challenges: 1) it cannot describe the temporal dependence across network snapshots; 2) the node embedding in the latent space fails to indicate changes in the network topology; and 3) it cannot avoid a lot of redundant computation via parameter inheritance on a series of snapshots. To this end, we propose a novel temporal network embedding method named Dynamic Cluster Structure Constraint model (DyCSC), whose core idea is to capture the evolution of temporal networks by imposing a temporal constraint on the tendency of the nodes in the network to a given number of clusters. It not only generates low-dimensional embedding vectors for nodes but also preserves the dynamic nonlinear features of temporal networks. Experimental results on multiple realworld datasets have demonstrated the superiority of DyCSC for temporal graph embedding, as it consistently outperforms competing methods by significant margins in multiple temporal link prediction tasks. Moreover, the ablation study further validates the effectiveness of the proposed temporal constraint.