Franziska Heeg

Franziska Heeg, Ingo Scholtes

Node centralities play a pivotal role in network science, social network analysis, and recommender systems. In temporal data, static path-based centralities like closeness or betweenness can give misleading results about the true importance of nodes in a temporal graph. To address this issue, temporal generalizations of betweenness and closeness have been defined that are based on the shortest time-respecting paths between pairs of nodes. However, a major issue of those generalizations is that the calculation of such paths is computationally expensive. Addressing this issue, we study the application of De Bruijn Graph Neural Networks (DBGNN), a time-aware graph neural network architecture, to predict temporal path-based centralities in time series data. We experimentally evaluate our approach in 13 temporal graphs from biological and social systems and show that it considerably improves the prediction of betweenness and closeness centrality compared to (i) a static Graph Convolutional Neural Network, (ii) an efficient sampling-based approximation technique for temporal betweenness, and (iii) two state-of-the-art time-aware graph learning techniques for dynamic graphs.

Franziska Heeg, Jonas Sauer, Petra Mutzel et al.

An important characteristic of temporal graphs is how the directed arrow of time influences their causal topology, i.e., which nodes can possibly influence each other causally via time-respecting paths. The resulting patterns are often neglected by temporal graph neural networks (TGNNs). To formally analyze the expressive power of TGNNs, we lack a generalization of graph isomorphism to temporal graphs that fully captures their causal topology. Addressing this gap, we introduce the notion of consistent event graph isomorphism, which utilizes a time-unfolded representation of time-respecting paths in temporal graphs. We compare this definition with existing notions of temporal graph isomorphisms. We illustrate and highlight the advantages of our approach and develop a temporal generalization of the Weisfeiler-Leman algorithm to heuristically distinguish non-isomorphic temporal graphs. Building on this theoretical foundation, we derive a novel message passing scheme for temporal graph neural networks that operates on the event graph representation of temporal graphs. An experimental evaluation shows that our approach performs well in a temporal graph classification experiment.