Predicting Critical Nodes in Temporal Networks by Dynamic Graph Convolutional Networks
This work addresses the challenge of predicting influential nodes in dynamic systems like social or epidemic networks, which is incremental as it builds on existing GCN and RNN techniques.
The paper tackles the problem of identifying critical nodes in temporal networks, where network structure changes over time, by proposing a novel learning framework combining GCNs and RNNs; experimental results show it outperforms benchmark methods in Kendall τ coefficient and top k hit rate on four real-world datasets.
Many real-world systems can be expressed in temporal networks with nodes playing far different roles in structure and function and edges representing the relationships between nodes. Identifying critical nodes can help us control the spread of public opinions or epidemics, predict leading figures in academia, conduct advertisements for various commodities, and so on. However, it is rather difficult to identify critical nodes because the network structure changes over time in temporal networks. In this paper, considering the sequence topological information of temporal networks, a novel and effective learning framework based on the combination of special GCNs and RNNs is proposed to identify nodes with the best spreading ability. The effectiveness of the approach is evaluated by weighted Susceptible-Infected-Recovered model. Experimental results on four real-world temporal networks demonstrate that the proposed method outperforms both traditional and deep learning benchmark methods in terms of the Kendall $τ$ coefficient and top $k$ hit rate.