NEAWalk: Inferring missing social interactions via topological-temporal embeddings of social groups

Real-world network data consisting of social interactions can be incomplete due to deliberately erased or unsuccessful data collection, which cause the misleading of social interaction analysis for many various time-aware applications. Naturally, the link prediction task has drawn much research interest to predict the missing edges in the incomplete social network. However, existing studies of link prediction cannot effectively capture the entangling topological and temporal dynamics already residing in the social network, thus cannot effectively reasoning the missing interactions in dynamic networks. In this paper, we propose the NEAWalk, a novel model to infer the missing social interaction based on topological-temporal features of patterns in the social group. NEAWalk samples the query-relevant walks containing both the historical and evolving information by focusing on the temporal constraint and designs a dual-view anonymization procedure for extracting both topological and temporal features from the collected walks to conduct the inference. Two-track experiments on several well-known network datasets demonstrate that the NEAWalk stably achieves superior performance against several state-of-the-art baseline methods.