BehaviorNet: A Fine-grained Behavior-aware Network for Dynamic Link Prediction

Dynamic link prediction has become a trending research subject because of its wide applications in the web, sociology, transportation, and bioinformatics. Currently, the prevailing approach for dynamic link prediction is based on graph neural networks, in which graph representation learning is the key to perform dynamic link prediction tasks. However, there are still great challenges because the structure of graphs evolves over time. A common approach is to represent a dynamic graph as a collection of discrete snapshots, in which information over a period is aggregated through summation or averaging. This way results in some fine-grained time-related information loss, which further leads to a certain degree of performance degradation. We conjecture that such fine-grained information is vital because it implies specific behavior patterns of nodes and edges in a snapshot. To verify this conjecture, we propose a novel fine-grained behavior-aware network (BehaviorNet) for dynamic network link prediction. Specifically, BehaviorNet adapts a transformer-based graph convolution network to capture the latent structural representations of nodes by adding edge behaviors as an additional attribute of edges. GRU is applied to learn the temporal features of given snapshots of a dynamic network by utilizing node behaviors as auxiliary information. Extensive experiments are conducted on several real-world dynamic graph datasets, and the results show significant performance gains for BehaviorNet over several state-of-the-art (SOTA) discrete dynamic link prediction baselines. Ablation study validates the effectiveness of modeling fine-grained edge and node behaviors.