A recurrent graph neural network for inductive representation learning on dynamic graphs

• Published in: Pattern recognition 2024-10, Vol.154, p.110577, Article 110577
• Main Authors: Yao, Hong-Yu, Zhang, Chun-Yang, Yao, Zhi-Liang, Chen, C.L. Philip, Hu, Junfeng
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Dynamic networks; Graph representation learning; Inductive learning; Recurrent graph neural networks; Unsupervised learning
• ISSN: 0031-3203; 1873-5142
• DOI: 10.1016/j.patcog.2024.110577

Graph representation learning has recently garnered significant attention due to its wide applications in graph analysis tasks. It is well-known that real-world networks are dynamic, with edges and nodes evolving over time. This presents unique challenges that are distinct from those of static networks. However, most graph representation learning methods are either designed for static graphs, or address only partial challenges associated with dynamic graphs. They overlook the intricate interplay between topology and temporality in the evolution of dynamic graphs and the complexity of sequence modeling. Therefore, we propose a new dynamic graph representation learning model, called as R-GraphSAGE, which takes comprehensive considerations for embedding dynamic graphs. By incorporating a recurrent structure into GraphSAGE, the proposed R-GraphSAGE explores structural and temporal patterns integrally to capture more fine-grained evolving patterns of dynamic graphs. Additionally, it offers a lightweight architecture to decrease the computational costs for handling snapshot sequences, achieving a balance between performance and complexity. Moreover, it can inductively process the addition of new nodes and adapt to the situations without labels and node attributes. The performance of the proposed R-GraphSAGE is evaluated across various downstream tasks with both synthetic and real-world networks. The experimental results demonstrate that it outperforms state-of-the-art baselines by a significant margin in most cases. •A recurrent graph neural network is proposed for dynamic graph embedding.•The R-GraphSAGE efficiently captures both topology and dynamics of temporal graphs.•The R-GraphSAGE inductively works for new nodes without labels and attributes.•The R-GraphSAGE shows strong competitiveness againt state-of-the-arts.