Role-Oriented Dynamic Network Embedding

Exploring the differences and important patterns of nodes from the perspective of roles has gradually developed into an interesting and important topic in network analysis. However, existing role-oriented network embedding methods focus more on identifying underlying roles for static network, which leads to complex temporal behaviors being overlooked and degraded performance facing dynamic network. The few role analytics methods for dynamic networks either cannot learn general node representations or fail to discovery role transitions of nodes. In this work, we propose a unified framework RDNE (Role-oriented Dynamic Network Embedding) to tackle such challenges, which aim to learn multiple embeddings for individual nodes based on time-varying structural behaviors. Based on regular equivalence, RDNE propagates the structural features over the graph to derive the initial role-oriented representations. Then, it applies capsule network to further model the mapping between nodes and roles, which is the first time capsule network is used for role discovery. For the varying and temporal dependence within dynamic network, we utilize the Gated Recurrent Unit to compute historical information and use historical information to influence the generation of representations at the next snapshot. Comprehensive experiments on both synthetic and real-world networks validate the superiority of the proposed RDNE.