Effective Temporal Graph Learning via Personalized PageRank

Graph representation learning aims to map nodes or edges within a graph using low-dimensional vectors, while preserving as much topological information as possible. During past decades, numerous algorithms for graph representation learning have emerged. Among them, proximity matrix representation methods have been shown to exhibit excellent performance in experiments and scale to large graphs with millions of nodes. However, with the rapid development of the Internet, information interactions are happening at the scale of billions every moment. Most methods for similarity matrix factorization still focus on static graphs, leading to incomplete similarity descriptions and low embedding quality. To enhance the embedding quality of temporal graph learning, we propose a temporal graph representation learning model based on the matrix factorization of Time-constrained Personalize PageRank (TPPR) matrices. TPPR, an extension of personalized PageRank (PPR) that incorporates temporal information, better captures node similarities in temporal graphs. Based on this, we use Single Value Decomposition or Nonnegative Matrix Factorization to decompose TPPR matrices to obtain embedding vectors for each node. Through experiments on tasks such as link prediction, node classification, and node clustering across multiple temporal graphs, as well as a comparison with various experimental methods, we find that graph representation learning algorithms based on TPPR matrix factorization achieve overall outstanding scores on multiple temporal datasets, highlighting their effectiveness.