Title: STWalk: Learning Trajectory Representations in Temporal Graphs,
Abstract: Analyzing the temporal behavior of nodes in time-varying graphs is useful for
many applications such as targeted advertising, community evolution and outlier
detection. In this paper, we present a novel approach, STWalk, for learning
trajectory representations of nodes in temporal graphs. The proposed framework
makes use of structural properties of graphs at current and previous time-steps
to learn effective node trajectory representations. STWalk performs random
walks on a graph at a given time step (called space-walk) as well as on graphs
from past time-steps (called time-walk) to capture the spatio-temporal behavior
of nodes. We propose two variants of STWalk to learn trajectory
representations. In one algorithm, we perform space-walk and time-walk as part
of a single step. In the other variant, we perform space-walk and time-walk
separately and combine the learned representations to get the final trajectory
embedding. Extensive experiments on three real-world temporal graph datasets
validate the effectiveness of the learned representations when compared to
three baseline methods. We also show the goodness of the learned trajectory
embeddings for change point detection, as well as demonstrate that arithmetic
operations on these trajectory representations yield interesting and
interpretable results.