Predicting Critical Nodes in Temporal Networks by Dynamic Graph Convolutional Networks

Many real-world systems can be expressed in temporal networks with nodes playing 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 graph convolutional and long short-term memory network (LSTM) is proposed to identify nodes with the best spreading ability. The special graph convolutional network can embed nodes in each sequential weighted snapshot and LSTM is used to predict the future importance of timing-embedded features. The effectiveness of the approach is evaluated by a 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 $\tau$ coefficient and top k hit rate.