TransformerG2G: Adaptive time-stepping for learning temporal graph embeddings using transformers
Authors: Alan John Varghese, Aniruddha Bora, Mengjia Xu, George Em Karniadakis
AI-generated Key Points
- Graph embedding is a popular technique for analyzing complex graph-structured data
- Existing methods focus on static graphs and do not consider temporal dynamics
- The proposed model, TransformerG2G, incorporates long-range dependencies from the historical context of a dynamic graph
- Transformer encoder is used to learn intermediate node representations from current state and previous context of the graph
- Two projection layers generate lower-dimensional multivariate Gaussian distributions as latent embeddings for each node at each timestamp
- TransformerG2G outperforms conventional multi-step methods and prior work (DynG2G) in terms of link prediction accuracy and computational efficiency, particularly for high degrees of novelty
- Time-dependent attention weights reveal automatic adaptive time stepping enabled by the transformer
- Attention weights uncover temporal dependencies, identify influential elements, and provide insights into complex interactions within the graph structure
- Strong correlation found between attention weights and node degree at different stages of graph topology evolution
- TransformerG2G model with uncertainty quantification improves upon existing methods for dynamic graph embedding by capturing long-term dependencies and achieving better performance in link prediction tasks
Abstract: Dynamic graph embedding has emerged as a very effective technique for addressing diverse temporal graph analytic tasks (i.e., link prediction, node classification, recommender systems, anomaly detection, and graph generation) in various applications. Such temporal graphs exhibit heterogeneous transient dynamics, varying time intervals, and highly evolving node features throughout their evolution. Hence, incorporating long-range dependencies from the historical graph context plays a crucial role in accurately learning their temporal dynamics. In this paper, we develop a graph embedding model with uncertainty quantification, TransformerG2G, by exploiting the advanced transformer encoder to first learn intermediate node representations from its current state ($t$) and previous context (over timestamps [$t-1, t-l$], $l$ is the length of context). Moreover, we employ two projection layers to generate lower-dimensional multivariate Gaussian distributions as each node's latent embedding at timestamp $t$. We consider diverse benchmarks with varying levels of ``novelty" as measured by the TEA plots. Our experiments demonstrate that the proposed TransformerG2G model outperforms conventional multi-step methods and our prior work (DynG2G) in terms of both link prediction accuracy and computational efficiency, especially for high degree of novelty. Furthermore, the learned time-dependent attention weights across multiple graph snapshots reveal the development of an automatic adaptive time stepping enabled by the transformer. Importantly, by examining the attention weights, we can uncover temporal dependencies, identify influential elements, and gain insights into the complex interactions within the graph structure. For example, we identified a strong correlation between attention weights and node degree at the various stages of the graph topology evolution.
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