An Advanced Deep Generative Framework for Temporal Link Prediction in Dynamic Networks

Temporal link prediction in dynamic networks has attracted increasing attention recently due to its valuable real-world applications. The primary challenge of temporal link prediction is to capture the spatial-temporal patterns and high nonlinearity of dynamic networks. Inspired by the success of image generation, we convert the dynamic network into a sequence of static images and formulate the temporal link prediction as a conditional image generation problem. We propose a novel deep generative framework, called NetworkGAN, to tackle the challenging temporal link prediction task efficiently, which simultaneously models the spatial and temporal features in the dynamic networks via deep learning techniques. The proposed NetworkGAN inherits the advantages of the graph convolutional network (GCN), the temporal matrix factorization (TMF), the long short-term memory network (LSTM), and the generative adversarial network (GAN). Specifically, an attentive GCN is first designed to automatically learn the spatial features of dynamic networks. Second, we propose a TMF enhanced attentive LSTM (TMF-LSTM) to capture the temporal dependencies and evolutionary patterns of dynamic networks, which predicts the network snapshot at next timestamp based on the network snapshots observed at previous timestamps. Furthermore, we employ a GAN framework to further refine the performance of temporal link prediction by using a discriminative model to guide the training of the deep generative model (i.e., TMF-LSTM) in an adversarial process. To verify the effectiveness of the proposed model, we conduct extensive experiments on five real-world datasets. Experimental results demonstrate the significant advantages of NetworkGAN compared to other strong competitors.