Rethinking the positive role of cluster structure in complex networks for link prediction tasks

Clustering is a fundamental problem in network analysis that finds closely connected groups of nodes and separates them from other nodes in the graph, while link prediction is to predict whether two nodes in a network are likely to have a link. The definition of both naturally determines that clustering must play a positive role in obtaining accurate link prediction tasks. Yet researchers have long ignored or used inappropriate ways to undermine this positive relationship. In this article, We construct a simple but efficient clustering-driven link prediction framework(ClusterLP), with the goal of directly exploiting the cluster structures to obtain connections between nodes as accurately as possible in both undirected graphs and directed graphs. Specifically, we propose that it is easier to establish links between nodes with similar representation vectors and cluster tendencies in undirected graphs, while nodes in a directed graphs can more easily point to nodes similar to their representation vectors and have greater influence in their own cluster. We customized the implementation of ClusterLP for undirected and directed graphs, respectively, and the experimental results using multiple real-world networks on the link prediction task showed that our models is highly competitive with existing baseline models. The code implementation of ClusterLP and baselines we use are available at https://github.com/ZINUX1998/ClusterLP.

DyCSC: Modeling the Evolutionary Process of Dynamic Networks Based on Cluster Structure

Temporal networks are an important type of network whose topological structure changes over time. Compared with methods on static networks, temporal network embedding (TNE) methods are facing three challenges: 1) it cannot describe the temporal dependence across network snapshots; 2) the node embedding in the latent space fails to indicate changes in the network topology; and 3) it cannot avoid a lot of redundant computation via parameter inheritance on a series of snapshots. To this end, we propose a novel temporal network embedding method named Dynamic Cluster Structure Constraint model (DyCSC), whose core idea is to capture the evolution of temporal networks by imposing a temporal constraint on the tendency of the nodes in the network to a given number of clusters. It not only generates low-dimensional embedding vectors for nodes but also preserves the dynamic nonlinear features of temporal networks. Experimental results on multiple realworld datasets have demonstrated the superiority of DyCSC for temporal graph embedding, as it consistently outperforms competing methods by significant margins in multiple temporal link prediction tasks. Moreover, the ablation study further validates the effectiveness of the proposed temporal constraint.