Nonparametric Multi-group Membership Model for Dynamic Networks
This work addresses the analysis of dynamic relational data for researchers and practitioners in network science, offering an incremental improvement over existing models.
The authors tackled the problem of summarizing common structure and dynamics in time-varying network data by proposing a nonparametric multi-group membership model that captures group-level dynamics, node memberships, and connectivity structure. Experimental results showed improved predictive performance over existing dynamic network models on future network forecasting and missing link prediction.
Relational data-like graphs, networks, and matrices-is often dynamic, where the relational structure evolves over time. A fundamental problem in the analysis of time-varying network data is to extract a summary of the common structure and the dynamics of the underlying relations between the entities. Here we build on the intuition that changes in the network structure are driven by the dynamics at the level of groups of nodes. We propose a nonparametric multi-group membership model for dynamic networks. Our model contains three main components: We model the birth and death of individual groups with respect to the dynamics of the network structure via a distance dependent Indian Buffet Process. We capture the evolution of individual node group memberships via a Factorial Hidden Markov model. And, we explain the dynamics of the network structure by explicitly modeling the connectivity structure of groups. We demonstrate our model's capability of identifying the dynamics of latent groups in a number of different types of network data. Experimental results show that our model provides improved predictive performance over existing dynamic network models on future network forecasting and missing link prediction.