GTEA: Representation learning for temporal interaction graphs via edge aggregation

Abstract

We consider the problem of representation learning for temporal interaction graphs where a network of entities with complex interactions over an extended period of time is modeled as a graph with a rich set of node and edge attributes. In particular, an edge between a node-pair within the graph corresponds to a multi-dimensional time-series. To fully capture and model the dynamics of the network, we propose GTEA, a framework of representation learning for temporal interaction graphs with per-edge time-based aggregation. Under GTEA, a Graph Neural Network (GNN) is integrated with a state-of-the-art sequence model, such as LSTM, Transformer and their time-aware variants. The sequence model generates edge embeddings to encode temporal interaction patterns between each pair of nodes, while the GNN-based backbone learns the topological dependencies and relationships among different nodes. GTEA also incorporates a sparsity-inducing self-attention mechanism to distinguish and focus on the more important neighbors of each node during the aggregation process. By capturing temporal interactive dynamics together with multi-dimensional node and edge attributes in a network, GTEA can learn fine-grained representations for a temporal interaction graph to enable or facilitate other downstream data analytic tasks. Experimental results show that GTEA outperforms state-of-the-art schemes including GraphSAGE, APPNP, and TGAT by delivering higher accuracy (100.00%, 98.51%, 98.05% ,79.90%) and macro-F1 score (100.00%, 98.51%, 96.68% ,79.90%) over four large-scale real-world datasets for binary/ multi-class node classification.