Spatial-Temporal Attention TCN-Based Link Prediction for Opportunistic Network

Link prediction for opportunistic networks faces the challenges of frequent changes in topology and complex and variable spatial-temporal information. Most existing studies focus on temporal or spatial features, ignoring ample potential information. In order to better capture the spatial-temporal correlations in the evolution of networks and explore their potential information, a link prediction method based on spatial-temporal attention and temporal convolution network (STA-TCN) is proposed. It slices opportunistic networks into discrete network snapshots. A state matrix based on topology information and attribute information is constructed to represent snapshots. Time convolutional networks and spatial-temporal attention mechanisms are employed to learn spatial-temporal information. Furthermore, to better improve link prediction performance, the proposed method converts the auto-correlation error into non-correlation error. On three real opportunistic network datasets, ITC, MIT, and Infocom06, experimental results demonstrate the superior predictive performance of the proposed method compared to baseline models, as shown by improved AUC and F1-score metrics.