Succinct Representation of Dynamic Networks

Abstract

Many network analysis tasks like classification over nodes require careful efforts in engineering features used by learning algorithms. Most of recent studies have been made and succeeded in the field of static network representation learning. However, real-world networks are often dynamic and little work has been done on how to describe dynamic networks. In this work, we pose the problem of condensing dynamic networks and introduce SuRep, an encoding-decoding framework which utilizes matrix factorization technique to derive a succinct representation of a dynamic network in any stationary phase. We show that the succinct representation method can uncover the invariant structural properties in the network evolution and derive dense feature representations of the nodes as the byproduct. This method can be easily extended to dynamic attribute networks. For experiments on detecting change points in dynamic networks and network classification with real-world datasets we demonstrate SuRep's potential for capturing latent patterns among nodes.