Time-varying Graph Representation Learning via Higher-Order Skip-Gram with Negative Sampling

A great variety of natural and artificial systems can be represented as networks of elementary structural entities coupled by relations between them. The abstraction of such systems as networks helps us understand, predict and optimize their behaviour [1, 2]. In this sense, node and graph embeddings have been established as standard feature representations in many learning tasks for graphs and complex networks [3, 4]. Node embedding methods map each node of a graph into a low-dimensional vector, that can be then used to solve downstream tasks such as edge prediction, network reconstruction and node classification. Node embeddings have proven successful in achieving low-dimensional encoding of static network structures, but many real-world networks are inherently dynamic, with interactions among nodes changing over time [5]. Time-resolved networks are also the support of important dynamical processes, such as epidemic or rumor spreading, cascading failures, consensus formation, etc. [6] Time-resolved node embeddings have been shown to yield improved performance for predicting the outcome of dynamical processes over networks, such as information diffusion and disease spreading [7]. In this paper we propose a representation learning model that performs an implicit tensor factorization on different higher-order representations of time-varying graphs.