DURENDAL: Graph deep learning framework for temporal heterogeneous networks

Abstract

Temporal Heterogeneous Networks (THNs) are evolving networks that characterize many real-world applications such as citation and events networks, recommender systems, and knowledge graphs. Forecasting THNs involves predicting future connections within a network that evolves over time and comprises diverse types of nodes and interactions with varying temporal dynamics. Although some Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) models have been successfully applied to forecast THNs, there is a lack of a general overview of how the message-passing computation could be extended to treat THNs. Moreover, most of the current solutions exhibit pitfalls in their training and evaluation strategies. Hence, in this work, we propose a graph deep learning framework for THN forecasting. Our framework decomposes the computation of a GNN layer into multiple components and introduces two different schemes to update embedding representations for THNs. This design allows the classification of existing solutions into special instances of our framework and highlights their potential limitations. We also extend the set of benchmarks for THNs by introducing two novel high-resolution temporal heterogeneous graph datasets derived from an emerging Web3 platform and a well-established e-commerce website. Overall, we conducted the first massive evaluation of THNs solutions over four temporal heterogeneous network datasets on two different future link prediction tasks using a fair newly introduced evaluation setting that considers the evolving nature of the data. Based on the limitations of existing solutions, we develop a new model that combines working techniques from previous models and leverages a new embedding update scheme. Experiments show the prediction power of our model compared to current solutions for link prediction in temporal graphs. Moreover, the experimental evaluation highlights the strengths and weaknesses of the different solutions and shows the effectiveness of our framework design.