Spatio-Temporal Attentive RNN for Node Classification in Temporal Attributed Graphs

Spatio-Temporal Attentive RNN for Node Classification in Temporal Attributed Graphs

Dongkuan Xu, Wei Cheng, Dongsheng Luo, Xiao Liu, Xiang Zhang

Proceedings of the Twenty-Eighth International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence
Main track. Pages 3947-3953. https://doi.org/10.24963/ijcai.2019/548

Node classification in graph-structured data aims to classify the nodes where labels are only available for a subset of nodes. This problem has attracted considerable research efforts in recent years. In real-world applications, both graph topology and node attributes evolve over time. Existing techniques, however, mainly focus on static graphs and lack the capability to simultaneously learn both temporal and spatial/structural features. Node classification in temporal attributed graphs is challenging for two major aspects. First, effectively modeling the spatio-temporal contextual information is hard. Second, as temporal and spatial dimensions are entangled, to learn the feature representation of one target node, it’s desirable and challenging to differentiate the relative importance of different factors, such as different neighbors and time periods. In this paper, we propose STAR, a spatio-temporal attentive recurrent network model, to deal with the above challenges. STAR extracts the vector representation of neighborhood by sampling and aggregating local neighbor nodes. It further feeds both the neighborhood representation and node attributes into a gated recurrent unit network to jointly learn the spatio-temporal contextual information. On top of that, we take advantage of the dual attention mechanism to perform a thorough analysis on the model interpretability. Extensive experiments on real datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of the STAR model.
Keywords:
Machine Learning: Classification
Machine Learning: Data Mining
Machine Learning: Semi-Supervised Learning