Knowledge-Based Systems 214 (2021) 106746

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Knowledge-Based Systems
journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/knosys

STGSN — A Spatial–Temporal Graph Neural Network framework for

time-evolving social networks
∗
Shengjie Min a,d , , Zhan Gao b , Jing Peng c , Liang Wang c , Ke Qin a , Bo Fang d
a
University of Electronic Science and Technology of China, China
b
Sichuan University, China
c
Sichuan Provincial Public Security Department, China
d
ChinaCloud Information Technology Co., Ltd., China

article info a b s t r a c t

Article history: Social Network Analysis (SNA) has been a popular field of research since the early 1990s. Law
Received 13 July 2020 enforcement agencies have been utilizing it as a tool for intelligence gathering and criminal inves-
Received in revised form 11 October 2020 tigation for decades. However, the graph nature of social networks makes it highly restricted to
Accepted 1 January 2021
intelligence analysis tasks, such as role prediction (node classification), social relation inference (link
Available online 9 January 2021
prediction), and criminal group discovery (community detection), etc. In the past few years, many
Keywords: studies have focused on Graph Neural Network (GNN), which utilizes deep learning methods to solve
Criminal Network Analysis graph-related problems. However, we have rarely seen GNNs tackle time-evolving social network
Social Network Analysis problems, especially in the criminology field. The existing studies have commonly over-looked the
Graph Neural Network temporal-evolution characteristics of social networks. In this paper, we propose a graph neural network
Spatial–Temporal Graph Neural Network framework, namely Spatial-Temporal Graph Social Network (STGSN), which models social networks
Attention network from both spatial and temporal perspectives. Using a novel approach, we leverage the temporal
attention mechanism to capture social networks’ temporal features. We design a method analyzing
temporal attention distribution to improve the interpretation ability of our method. In the end, we
conduct extensive experiments on six public datasets to prove our methods’ effectiveness.
© 2021 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

1. Introduction Criminal Network Analysis (CNA) is imperative for future

1.1. Social network analysis and criminal network analysis
Social Network Analysis (SNA) [1] has emerged as a critical
technique in modern sociology. Researches generally represent a
social network as a graph that turns the SNA problems into graph
mining tasks. SNA related tasks usually fall into three levels: node,
link, and graph. Firstly, at the node level, centrality analysis aims
to identify the key actors in the network via multiple metrics,
such as degree, betweenness, eigenvector, etc. Likewise, node
classification is mainly used to predict the roles of the nodes
in the networks. Secondly, for link-related problems, link pre-
diction infers the potential links between nodes. Thirdly, at the
graph level, community detection is determined by clusters of
nodes based on network structure and topology. Other research
directions related to SNA also exist, such as information diffusion,
community evolution, recommendations, etc.
∗ Corresponding author at: University of Electronic Science and Technology
of China, China.
E-mail address: kelvin.msj@gmail.com (S. Min).
crime prediction and prevention. Researchers have successfully
applied CNA in practice since the early 1990s [2–6]. Most of
the social networks in the criminology field are incomplete due
to a lack of intelligence, only partially captured evidence, the
use of anti-detection strategies, etc. Therefore, it is crucial for
law enforcement agencies to investigate missing objects, hid-
den connections, and potential groups. As one of the most vital
techniques for intelligence analysis, CNA mostly conducts in-
vestigations on phone calls, financial transactions, and physical
meetups, etc.
However, graph-related problems in intelligence analysis, such
as role prediction, relation inference, etc. rely heavily on hand-
crafted feature engineering, which requires in-depth domain
knowledge and intensive labor. There are incredible challenges
for the conventional methods when neighborhood information
and temporal evolution of the social networks are crucial for the
predictions. Furthermore, the scarcity of reusability among differ-
ent scenarios is another big obstacle. Therefore, the complexity of
graph data has imposed a significant challenge upon the existing
machine learning algorithms.

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.knosys.2021.106746
0950-7051/© 2021 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.
S. Min, Z. Gao, J. Peng et al.
1.2. Deep learning and graph neural network
Deep learning has boosted research in many fields in the last
decades, such as image classification, video processing, speech
recognition, natural language processing, etc. In particular, re-
searchers have successfully utilized Convolutional Neural Net-
works (CNNs) and Recurrent Neural Networks (RNNs) to model
spatial features and temporal dynamics, respectively. However,
data like images, audios, and videos are in the form of pixels or
frames chronologically. At the same time, graph data is gener-
ated from the non-Euclidean domain and has no specific orders.
Intuitively, a graph may have an un-fixed number of nodes with
an indeterminate amount of edges. Therefore, operations like
convolutions are straightforward on images but complicated on
graphs.
Recently, inspired by methods such as CNNs and RNNs, many
studies have focused on extending deep learning methodologies
for graph-related problems, called Graph Neural Networks (GNN).
The comprehensive survey (as shown in [7]) categorizes GNNs
into four groups: Recurrent Graph Neural Networks (RecGNNs),
Convolutional Graph Neural Networks (ConvGNNs), Graph Auto-
Encoders (GAEs), and Spatial–Temporal Graph Neural Networks
(STGNN). Early studies mainly fell into the RecGNNs group, which
learns a node’s representation by propagating neighbor infor-
mation iteratively. Likewise, motivated by the success of CNNs,
research efforts have been primarily put into ConvGNNs, which
cast the notion of convolution into neural networks for graph
data. On the other hand, GAEs encode the graph features into low-
dimensional representations from which it decodes to obtain the
graph information. Meanwhile, STGNNs aim to model both spatial
and temporal dynamicity of the graph.
1.3. Deep learning for social network analysis
Many studies have been conducted using deep learning frame-
works to tackle SNA-related problems in recent years. The cen-
tral problem for analyzing social networks is how to encode
the network data into low-dimensional representations (vectors)
to preserve the network structure and information effectively
for the downstream machine learning models to analyze social
networks further. It has been demonstrated that deep learning
methodology has potent capabilities for this crucial problem,
and many successful methods have brought SNA to the next
level, such as GCN [8], CTDNE [9], GraphSAGE [10], and GAT [11]
etc. In study [12], the authors conduct a comprehensive review
of the current studies utilizing deep learning models for social
networks. It categorizes the real-world social networks as ho-
mogeneous, heterogeneous, attributed, and dynamic. Our study
mainly looks into dynamic social networks, which evolve over
time with frequent addition/deletion of nodes and links. Although
some existing studies have looked into learning dynamic net-
works, we novelly utilize the concept of STGNN and attention
mechanism to model time-evolving social networks for better
performance.
STGNNs consider both spatial and temporal dynamics when
modeling the graph while other GNNs mainly focus on modeling
the spatial structure of networks. Many methods facilitate graph
convolutions to capture spatial dependency with RNNs or CNNs to
model the temporal dependence. Recent studies have put a lot of
effort into STGNNs, such as for traffic forecasting [13–17], driver
maneuver anticipation [18], and action recognition [19]. With the
emerging STGNN methods that have mostly looked into computer
vision problems, there has been very little research conducted
utilizing the concept of STGNN for social networks.
From the spatial perspective, unlike the fixed-size images and
grids that CNN typically deals with, graphs have a more complex
2
Knowledge-Based Systems 214 (2021) 106746
topological structure with no spatial locality like grids. Most re-
cently, after some pioneering work in RecGNNs, ConvGNNs have
become the most popular approach thanks to their efficiency
and convenience. ConvGNNs fall into two categories: spectral-
based and spatial-based. Spectral-based methods take the path
of graph signal processing for graph convolution, and typical
methods are Spectral Convolutional Neural Network (Spectral
CNN) [20], Chebyshev Spectral CNN (ChebNet) [21], Graph Con-
volutional Network (GCN) [8], etc. On the other hand, the spatial-
based approach is similar to the convolutional operation of a
conventional CNN on images. It mainly focuses on the spatial re-
lations in networks, such as GraphSage [10], GAT [11], GAAN [17],
GeniePath [22], DeepMGGE [23], etc.
In this study, the main aspect that we will look into will
be temporal dependency on social networks. Existing methods
usually take RNN-based approaches to capture temporal dynam-
ics. However, recurrent neural architectures follow a sequential
path from past units to current ones, which leads to the time-
consuming iterative training and gradient explosion/vanishing
issues. Attention, as one of the most influential concepts in
recent deep learning research, was initially invented to solve
these sequential problems with much better performance. The
study cited in [24] initially introduced an attention mechanism
to memorize long sentences in neural machine translation. Then,
it rapidly grew and was widely adopted in various fields. The pre-
vious studies included image caption generation [25] global/local
attention [26], multi-head attention [27], Simple Neural Atten-
tive Learner (SNAIL) [28] , Self-Attention Generative Adversarial
Network (SAGAN) [29], and Graph Attention Model (GAM) [30].
In the criminology field, social networks can have a complex
topological structure and also evolve. We cannot make any as-
sumptions on what periods are more relevant for predictions.
We have observed group interactions (behaviors) with various
kinds of temporal patterns. As shown in Fig. 1, we demonstrate
three examples in a meetup network, in which some may have a
linear development trend, as shown in Case 1 and 2. In contrast,
others may produce a significant seasonality pattern, such as
that shown in Case 3. With the temporal aspects of the network
ignored, all three cases would produce similar prediction results
even though they are entirely different. In our work, we focus
our study on the graphs as they have both spatial and temporal
characteristics. Inspired by the recent work on STGNNs, we aim
to devise a spatial–temporal deep learning framework for time-
evolving social networks. For spatial convolutions, we adopt the
graph embedding approach over spectral methods due to two
main reasons. Firstly, we need to incorporate node features as
nodes in social networks have various attributes. Secondly, we
deal with social networks that evolve, which means that the
number of nodes and edges will change dynamically over time.
One of our primary goals is to capture the temporal evolution
and make it beneficial for subsequent tasks. Regarding temporal
dependency, we novelly introduce the attention mechanism to
model the temporal dynamics and design an approach to make
the model more interpretable. Finally, our method can capture
both spatial and temporal aspects of the time-evolving social
networks.
In summary, our main contributions are as follows:
1. We propose a novel framework of the Spatial–Temporal
Graph Neural Network specifically for social network mod-
eling, called STGSN. It models spatial and temporal features
of time-evolving social networks, which can be particularly
useful for criminal network analysis.
2. To the best of our knowledge, our method is the first
attempt that leverages attention mechanisms on graph em-
beddings to make the framework capable of modeling the
temporal characteristic of social networks.
S. Min, Z. Gao, J. Peng et al.
Fig. 1. Temporal Characteristics in Criminal Networks (Meetup). In the following examples, we denote the target user, gang members and ordinary users in yellow,
red, and white respectively. (1) Case 1: The meetups between the central user and gang members decrease over time and vanish in the end, which shows less
group involvement and less potential danger. (2) Case 2: The meetups between the central user and gang members increase monthly, which is a strong signal that
the user in question is joining the group as a new member. (3) Case 3: The target user contacts other gang members in a seasonal fashion, which indicates a high
probability that he/she holds a specific kind of role or position in the group.
3. We discuss the strong expressive ability of the proposed
method in-depth by creating five temporal attention distri-
bution categories and analyzing how they affect the down-
stream predictions.
4. We conduct extensive experiments on six public datasets
with a series of prediction tasks. The results show that the
model outperforms state-of-the-art baselines significantly.
2. Related work
2.1. Graph neural network for social network analysis
DeepInf [31] is an end to end unified framework designed
by Qiu et al. which utilizes graph convolution and attention
mechanisms to incorporate user-specific features and network
structures for predicting social influence. Zhang et al. propose a
framework: SEAL [32] for link prediction. For each target link,
SEAL extracts a local enclosing subgraph and uses a GNN to learn
general graph structure features. Wang et al. propose an embed-
ding model, namely, Multiple Conditional Network Embedding
(MCNE) [33]. Combined with a GNN based on the message-
passing/receiving mechanism, the model introduces the binary
mask, followed by an attention network to model correlations
among multiple preferences. Liu et al. [34] point out that a single
vector representation is not enough for network embedding — for
instance, used on an online shopping website where a customer
may have bought items of disparate genres. Existing embedding
techniques tend to fuse different aspects of a node into only
a single vector representation, which can be problematic. This
study proposes a polysemous embedding approach for modeling
multiple aspects of nodes. Ioannidis et al. [35] also present a
Graph Recurrent Neural Network (GRNN) where nodes engage
in multi-relational scenarios. In study [36], motivated by the
concept of GCNs, the authors devise a method, called RCNN, to
identify the critical nodes (super-spreaders) in complex networks
based on the message-spreading ability.
3
Knowledge-Based Systems 214 (2021) 106746
2.2. Spatial–temporal graph neural network
Many studies have extensively applied the concept of STGNN
in the field of traffic forecasting. Li et al. [13] devise a deep learn-
ing framework called Diffusion Convolutional Recurrent Neural
Network (DCRNN) for traffic forecasting that combines spatial
and temporal dependencies in traffic flow. The proposed model
utilizes bidirectional random walks to capture the spatial correla-
tion and the encoder–decoder architecture to seize the temporal
dependence. Guo et al. [14] propose a novel attention-based
spatial–temporal graph convolutional network (ASTGCN) for traf-
fic forecasting problems. In this study, the attention mechanism
aims to select the information that is relatively critical to the
current task from both spatial and temporal perspectives. In
study [15], Yu et al. propose a deep learning framework for
traffic forecasting, called Spatial–Temporal Graph Convolutional
Networks (STGCN), which integrates graph convolution layer and
gated temporal convolution layers through spatial–temporal con-
volutional blocks. GaAN proposed in study [17], unlike the exist-
ing multi-head attention mechanism, uses a convolutional sub-
network to control each attention head’s importance. The re-
searchers build Graph Gated Recurrent Unit (GGRU) by using
GaAN as building blocks to address the traffic speed forecast-
ing problem. In study [9], researchers propose two algorithms:
Continuous-Time Dynamic Network Embeddings (CTDNE) and
TemporalWalk, which leverages random walks strategy to incor-
porate temporal information into network embedding methods.
Motivated by the success of traffic forecasting, STGNN has
developed rapidly in other fields as well. In study [18], for driver
maneuver anticipation, Jain et al. propose an approach, named
structural-RNN (S-RNN), which combines the power of spatial–
temporal graphs and Recurrent Neural Networks (RNNs) by trans-
forming arbitrary spatial–temporal graphs into a mixture of RNNs
and effectively captures the interactions in the underlying
S. Min, Z. Gao, J. Peng et al.
Table 1
Summary of Notations.
Symbols Definition
G A social network graph
V Set of nodes
E Set of edges
X Feature vector
W, B Learning parameters
N(i) The neighbors of node i
hki The embedding of the ith node within the kth layer
′
hti The embedding of the ith node at the historical time step t ′
htotal
i The embedding of the ith node (all the time steps as a whole)
α Attention weights
α <total,t >
′
The attention weight (time step t ′ to total)
e The coefficient between two different embeddings
<total,t ′ > ′ GraphSage [10], to make our framework inductive. We aggregate
e The coefficient of the time step t to total embedding
Cit Temporal attention context
hˆti The final embedding of node i til time t
AGG() Aggregation function
ATT () Attention function
spatial–temporal graphs. Wu et al. [16] devise a novel CNN-based
graph neural network architecture, namely Graph WaveNet. Mo-
tivated by WaveNet, the model adopts stacked dilated casual
convolutions to capture temporal dependencies that handle very
long sequences. Yan et al. [19] propose a novel Spatial–Temporal
Graph Convolutional Networks (ST-GCN) model for skeleton-
based action recognition. The model applies spatial and temporal
graph convolutions on the skeleton sequences.
3. Methodology
We propose a deep learning framework for modeling both the
spatial and temporal patterns of time-evolving social networks.
The structure consists of three steps: Firstly, we utilize an embed-
ding method to capture the node’s spatial features for each time
slices. Secondly, we propose an attention-based mechanism to ag-
gregate the temporal memory of the graph so that the model can
pay weighted attention intentionally to different historical steps.
Additionally, we focus on improving the interpretation ability of
the model by looking into the temporal attention distribution.
Thirdly, we assemble the neural networks above-mentioned for
the downstream social network prediction tasks.
3.1. Framework overview
We first present the process of embedding the node’s spatial
features. Then, we illustrate the Algorithm 1, for building the
temporal attention network, and discuss its expressive ability.
Finally, we demonstrate the operation of how to put the pieces
together and make the final prediction (see Table 1).
3.2. Graph spatial convolution
We construct a social network graph G = (V , E) where V =
{v1 , v2 , v3 ...vi } denotes the set of the nodes (users), and E =
{e1 , e2 , e3 ...ei } defines the set of edges (relations) between them.
Let X = {x1 , x2 ...xi } be the feature vector, and xi represents the
user’s ith feature, such as age, origin, hobby, etc.
In our case, the nodes and edges in the social network keep
changing as the network evolves. Therefore, instead of mod-
eling the spatial dependency via Graph Convolution Network
4
Knowledge-Based Systems 214 (2021) 106746
Fig. 2. Node Embedding Example. Target node: v1 . Layer-0 neighbors: Node v1 ,
v2 , v3 , v6 , v7 . Layer-1 neighbors: v2 , v3 , v4 , v5 .
(GCN) [8], we adopt the graph embedding approach, similar to
the neighborhood features to the target node following Eq. (3).
hki represents the embedding of the ith node in the kth layer.
N(i) is the set that contains the neighbors of node i within K
hubs. hkj −1 defines the feature embeddings of neighbor j while
hki −1 denotes the embedding of node i in the (k − 1)th layer. W
and B are the learning parameters that reflect the importance
of the neighbors of node i and node i itself in the previous
layer during aggregation. Initially, when k = 0, h0i equals xi , as
shown in Eq. (1), which is the feature vector of node i. Then, we
aggregate all neighbors’ information layer by layer until we reach
the target node — node i. Finally, hKi is the final embedding of
node i, denoted as ziK in Eq. (2).
h0i = xi (1)
hKi = ziK (2)
([ ∑ k−1
])
j∈N(i) hj
hki = ReLU Wk ⏐ ⏐ , Bk hki −1 , ∀k ∈ {1, 2, . . . , K }
⏐N(i) ⏐
(3)
To give an illustration, as shown in Fig. 2, we have K = 2,
which indicates that we aggregate the information from neigh-
bors within two hubs. However, the number of layers can be
set dynamically to different applications. In our case, we only
consider neighboring nodes within two hubs. Taking node v1
as an example, we embed the neighbors: v2 , v3 , v6 , v7 , and v1
from layer-0 to the layer-1 neighbors that are v2 , v3 , v4 , and
v5 . And then, we further aggregate the layer-1 neighbors to the
target node v1 at layer-2. In our case, If we calculate the node i’s
embedding across all the time steps as a while, we denote it as
htotal
i . In contrast, if the embedding is only for a specific time step
′
t ′ , we note it as hti .
3.3. Temporal attention neural network
As shown in Fig. 3, after the aggregation of the spatial features,
on which we build an attention network to capture the temporal
features as the network evolves.
Firstly, we calculate the global embeddings of each node,
denoted as htotal i . Secondly, we carry out the aggregation at each
′
time step independently. Let hti be the embedding of node i at
time t up to the present time: t. h0i , h1i , . . . , hti −1 , hti represents
′
the embeddings of node i at the time step 0, 1, . . . , t − 1, t
respectively. Thirdly, we leverage the attention mechanism and
calculate the coefficient between the embeddings from each time
step and the total embedding by following Eq. (4), where t is the
target time step in question, and t ′ denotes a preceding time step.
⟨total,t ′ ⟩
ei defines the magnitude of the importance of time step
S. Min, Z. Gao, J. Peng et al. Knowledge-Based Systems 214 (2021) 106746

Algorithm 1 Algorithm for STGSN

Input: G = {V , E}, K = {# of hubs of neighbors}, T = {# of time
steps}
Output: H = {Node embeddings}
1: Initialization:
′
2: H
total
, H t ← {}, {}
3: Spatial Aggregation:
4: for vi ∈ G do
5: Aggregate K-hubs neighborhood information globally to pro-
duce
the total node embedding for node i.
6: htotal
i = AGG(N(i) )
7: H total ← H total ∪ htotal
i
8: end for
9: Temporal Segmentation:
10: GT ← {Segment the network in T time steps}
11: for gt ∈ GT do
12: for vi ∈ gt do
13: Aggregate K-hubs neighborhood information to produce
node i′ s
spatial embedding at time step t ′ .
′
14: hti = AGG(N(i) )
15: end for
′ ′ ′
16: Hit ← Hit ∪ hti
′ ′ ′
17: H t ← H t ∪ Hit
18: end for
19: Temporal Attention Network:
20: for vi ∈ G do
Fig. 3. Temporal Attention Network.
21: Cit ← {}
′ ′
22: Retrieve htotal
i , hti from H total and H t and calculate the
temporal attention w.r.t the time step t ′ to the total
t ′ to the total embedding. Intuitively, it determines how much embedding.
attention should the model pay to time step t ′ when making
α <total,t > = ATT (htotal
′ ′
23: i , hti )
predictions at time step t. We employ two training parameters:
Cit ← Cit + α <total,t
′> ′
′ ′
W t on hti , W total on htotal . After applying a weight vector (training 24: ∗ hti
i
hˆti ← [Cit , htotal
′ ′
parameter) a on the concatenation of W t hti and W total htotal i , we 25: i ]
finally use LeakyReLU for non-linearity. After that, we apply a 26: H ← H ∪ hˆti
⟨t ,t ′ ⟩
softmax layer to produce the attention weight αi using Eq. (5). 27: end for
′
We multiple the hidden state of node i: hti by its corresponding 28: return H
⟨total,t ′ ⟩ ′
attention weight αi and training parameter for each Wit
time step. In the end, we sum them up and apply ELU as the
non-linearity function to get the attention context Cit , as shown as: ‘‘why’’. Therefore, we must make the model with a decent
in Eq. (2). expressive ability to make the prediction (intelligence) model
effective and practical. To achieve this goal, we categorize the
( [ ′ ′ ])
⟨total,t ′ ⟩
ei = LeakyReLU aT W t hti , W total htotal
i (4)
temporal patterns in five classes:
⟨total,t ′ ⟩
ei
⟨total,t ′ ⟩ ⟨total,t ′ ⟩ e 1. Increasing Trend: the time steps become more important
αi = Softmax(ei )= ∑ ⟨total,t ′ ⟩
(5)
t ei as they are closer to the present.
e
( ) 0 2. Decreasing Trend: the historical time steps are more influ-
t
∑ ⟨total,t ′ ⟩ ′ ′ ential than the recent ones.
Cit = ELU αi Wit hti (6) 3. Seasonal: the time steps demonstrate a pattern of periodi-
t ′ =0 cal fluctuation.
4. Key Player(s): one or several time slices show dominant
Another advantage of leveraging attention mechanism is the
influence than others.
interpretation ability. As mentioned above, the existing resear-
5. Random: there are no known patterns found, and all the
ches have intensively studied the temporal features of networks
time steps contribute randomly.
in the traffic forecasting field. For example, in study [14], the
research utilizes three time-series segments: recent, daily-period,
and weekly-period, respectively, to intentionally focus on the 3.4. Final aggregation
last a few minutes to present and the same period on daily and
weekly basis. Unlike traffic forecasting, in our case, the temporal As shown in Eq. (7), after the temporal attention created, we
characteristics may vary from case to case dramatically. For social build the final node embedding — hˆti by aggregating the temporal
networks in the criminology field, law enforcement agencies need attention context Cit and the node embedding htotal
i . In our case,
to know the prediction results as: ‘‘what’’. More importantly, we aggregate Cit and htotal
i by directly concatenating them up.
they need to know the reasoning logic behind the prediction However, Summing them up can also be one choice if it produces
5
S. Min, Z. Gao, J. Peng et al. Knowledge-Based Systems 214 (2021) 106746

Table 2
Dataset Statistics.
Ego-Comm InVS13 InVS15 IARadoslawEmail FB-Forum DNC-Email
Nodes 774 100 232 167 899 2029
Edges 13,287 394,247 1,283,194 82,927 33,720 39,264
Average Degrees 34.33 8299.92 11,718.66 993.14 75.02 38.70
Durations 18 months 2 weeks 2 weeks 10 months 25 weeks 18 months
Node ID ✓ ✓ ✓ ✓ ✓ ✓
Node Attributed ✗ ✓ ✓ ✗ ✗ ✗
Edge Attributed ✓ ✓ ✓ ✓ ✓ ✓
Directed ✗ ✗ ✗ ✓ ✗ ✓
Temporal ✓ ✓ ✓ ✓ ✓ ✓

better performance. In the end, hˆti is the ultimate representation 4. Experiments

of node i for the downstream prediction tasks.
hˆti = Cit , htotal
[ ]
i (7)
After the final aggregation, our method incorporates the spa-
tial and temporal features in the node embedding — hˆti , which
can be the inputs that beneficial to the downstream prediction
tasks. For example, node classification tasks will take the node
embedding to train the model, while link prediction algorithms
will take two nodes’ embeddings to build the model and make
the predictions.
3.5. Parameters tuning
In the section, we discuss some parameter tunings for the
proposed model.
Coefficient: When calculating the coefficient between two
embeddings, there are a few different approaches. We can apply
′
dot product noted as Eq. (8) or distance following Eq. (9) on hti
total
and hi , which intuitively infer how close the two embeddings
related to each other. Another approach is to have a neural
network to study the magnitude of the correlation between two
embeddings by using Eq. (4).
⟨total,t ′ ⟩ ′ networks, Ego-Comm has 774 nodes (users and friends) and
ei = hti · htotal
i (8)
√ 13,287 face-to-face communications over 18 months. Addition-
⟨total,t ′ ⟩ ( t′ )2
ei = hi − htotal
i (9)
Temporal Attention: After applying the attention on each
time step, we build temporal attention as a context, namely Cit ,
for the final embedding. There are some different methods for this
context construction: concatenation, average sum, and pooling,
etc. As shown in Eq. (6), one effective way is to sum the embed-
dings from all time-slices and produce a final context vector Cit
with the same size as htotal
i . The intuition is that the importance
of all time steps combined has the same magnitude as the total
embedding. On the other hand, the concatenation approach pays
more attention to preceding time slices and equally treats all time
steps (including the current one).
Attention Heads: To calculate the temporal attention Cit , we
can combine the α ⟨total,t ⟩ (attention weight), Wit (training pa-
′ ′
′
rameter), and hti (embedding from time t ′ ) following Eq. (6).
Inspired by the study of Multi-head Attention [27], we can utilize
a multi-head mechanism and try to achieve better performance
by following Eq. (10), in which k represents the number of atten-
tion heads employed. However, after a series of experiments, we
find that there is not much difference between single-head and
multi-head setup w.r.t the effectiveness. Therefore, in our case,
we employ single-head other than multi-head to get the same
level of performance with much less computational cost.
( )
K t
∑ ∑ ⟨total,t ′ ⟩ ′ ′
Cit = ELU αi Wit hti
k=1 t ′ =0
In this section, we conduct extensive experiments on six pub-
lic datasets and evaluate our framework with regards to down-
stream prediction tasks. In the end, the results show that STGSN
outperforms state-of-the-art methods significantly.
4.1. Datasets and metrics
Meetup and communication networks are two of the most
popular network types in our case. In our experiments, we se-
lected six public datasets, which include three meetup networks:
Ego-Comm [37], InVS13 [38], InVS15 [38], and three commu-
nication networks: IARadoslawEmail [39], FB-Forum [40], and
DNC-Email [41]. Ego-Comm is a communication ego network
consisting of face-to-face communication between 24 users and
their friends. InVS13 and InVS15 are two similar co-presence
datasets collected from a workplace in two different years. On the
other hand, IARadoslawEmail is an internal email communication
network between employees of a mid-sized manufacturing com-
pany. FB-Forum is the users’ interactive activities in a facebook-
like forum, and DNC-Email is the directed network of emails in
the 2016 Democratic National Committee email leak.
The statistics of the dataset are listed in Table 2. For meetup
ally, it also has friendship ratings (user-to-friend) ranging from
0 to 10 on the 9th and 18th months, respectively. In this case,
friendship ratings change from time to time. Intuitively speaking,
the more two people meet up, the more intimate they become,
and the higher the friendship ratings are. Ego-Comm is a perfect
example indicating temporal characteristics worthy considera-
tion when looking at social network prediction. For InVS13 and
InVS15, the co-presence data are formatted as {t , i, j}. Each line
represents a contact occurring at time t between two nodes i
and j. InVS13 has 100 users and 394,247 communications. In
contrast, InVS15 has 232 users and 1,283,194 communications.
They both have ten days of data over two weeks and also provide
the metadata indicating the user’s group affiliation: department
in this case. For communication networks, in IARadoslawEmail
and DNC-Email, nodes are senders and recipients, while edges
are email exchanges. IARadoslawEmail has 167 users and 82927
emails over ten months, DNC-Email has 2029 and 39264 ex-
changes over 18 months, and FB-Forum contains 899 users and
the 33720 interactive activities among them over 25 weeks.
In the experiments, we employ the area under the ROC curve
(AUC) and F1 (micro), short for the micro-averaged F1 score,
to measure performance on binary and multi-class classifica-
tion tasks, respectively. Meanwhile, we use Mean Absolute Error
(MAE) and Mean Squared Error (MSE) to compare the regres-
sion tasks. MAE measures the absolute average distance between
the real data and the predicted data, while MSE measures the
(10) squared-average distance between the real data and the predicted
data.
6
S. Min, Z. Gao, J. Peng et al. Knowledge-Based Systems 214 (2021) 106746

Table 3
MAE and MSE of Algorithm (Regression on Ego-Comm).
Baseline {1 − 9} → 9 {10 − 18} → 18
MAE MSE MAE MSE
GCN 2.316 ± 0.037 8.391 ± 0.392 1.983 ± 0.015 6.222 ± 0.144
CTDNE 2.237 ± 0.117 7.294 ± 0.092 1.921 ± 0.017 6.291 ± 0.068
TemporalWalk 2.195 ± 0.051 7.019 ± 0.027 1.881 ± 0.022 5.760 ± 0.113
GraphSAGE (Mean) 2.234 ± 0.025 7.003 ± 0.241 1.926 ± 0.032 6.581 ± 0.078
GraphSAGE (MaxPool) 2.191 ± 0.100 6.809 ± 0.277 1.737 ± 0.019 5.415 ± 0.047
GraphSAGE (MeanPool) 2.185 ± 0.051 6.735 ± 0.291 1.950 ± 0.022 6.676 ± 0.106
GAT (Single-head) 2.222 ± 0.021 7.599 ± 0.322 1.990 ± 0.034 6.721 ± 0.288
GAT (Multi-head) 2.195 ± 0.048 7.371 ± 0.348 1.789 ± 0.062 5.631 ± 0.271
STGSN (No Attention) 2.559 ± 0.172 9.618 ± 0.393 2.036 ± 0.073 7.451 ± 0.311
STGSN (Single-head) 2.169 ± 0.011 6.913 ± 0.271 1.730 ± 0.028 5.302 ± 0.093
STGSN (Multi-head) 2.068 ± 0.021 6.265 ± 0.228 1.770 ± 0.025 5.581 ± 0.089

Table 4
F1(Micro) Score of Algorithm (Classification on InVS13).
Baseline {1 − 6} → 7 {1 − 7} → 8 {1 − 8} → 9 {1 − 9} → 10
F1 (Micro) F1 (Micro) F1 (Micro) F1 (Micro)
GCN 0.416 ± 0.021 0.425 ± 0.039 0.420 ± 0.037 0.438 ± 0.026
CTDNE 0.520 ± 0.012 0.494 ± 0.011 0.521 ± 0.017 0.529 ± 0.018
TemporalWalk 0.555 ± 0.011 0.411 ± 0.027 0.478 ± 0.012 0.560 ± 0.013
GraphSAGE (Mean) 0.551 ± 0.026 0.513 ± 0.022 0.568 ± 0.025 0.634 ± 0.028
GraphSAGE (MaxPool) 0.527 ± 0.029 0.511 ± 0.006 0.582 ± 0.019 0.641 ± 0.011
GraphSAGE (MeanPool) 0.503 ± 0.025 0.516 ± 0.031 0.574 ± 0.029 0.621 ± 0.013
GAT (Single-head) 0.434 ± 0.021 0.409 ± 0.017 0.474 ± 0.017 0.514 ± 0.016
GAT (Multi-head) 0.436 ± 0.051 0.410 ± 0.027 0.463 ± 0.034 0.597 ± 0.033
STGSN (No Attention) 0.4696 ± 0.031 0.502 ± 0.032 0.538 ± 0.024 0.609 ± 0.033
STGSN (Single-head) 0.589 ± 0.021 0.525 ± 0.025 0.590 ± 0.005 0.652 ± 0.021
STGSN (Multi-head) 0.511 ± 0.031 0.502 ± 0.036 0.542 ± 0.023 0.634 ± 0.029

Table 5
F1(Micro) Score of Algorithm (Classification on InVS15).
Baseline {1 − 6} → 7 {1 − 7} → 8 {1 − 8} → 9 {1 − 9} → 10
F1 (Micro) F1 (Micro) F1 (Micro) F1 (Micro)
GCN 0.382 ± 0.014 0.364 ± 0.016 0.367 ± 0.011 0.406 ± 0.019
CTDNE 0.576 ± 0.009 0.505 ± 0.012 0.473 ± 0.010 0.531 ± 0.017
TemporalWalk 0.579 ± 0.017 0.509 ± 0.021 0.494 ± 0.029 0.497 ± 0.011
GraphSAGE (Mean) 0.849 ± 0.002 0.559 ± 0.010 0.574 ± 0.003 0.636 ± 0.005
GraphSAGE (MaxPool) 0.838 ± 0.004 0.553 ± 0.012 0.566 ± 0.001 0.611 ± 0.013
GraphSAGE (MeanPool) 0.842 ± 0.006 0.546 ± 0.008 0.576 ± 0.006 0.613 ± 0.010
GAT (Single-head) 0.513 ± 0.016 0.462 ± 0.018 0.438 ± 0.013 0.457 ± 0.017
GAT (Multi-head) 0.518 ± 0.011 0.477 ± 0.014 0.456 ± 0.008 0.469 ± 0.012
STGSN (No Attention) 0.849 ± 0.012 0.527 ± 0.029 0.578 ± 0.013 0.573 ± 0.019
STGSN (Single-head) 0.852 ± 0.005 0.573 ± 0.010 0.578 ± 0.005 0.631 ± 0.023
STGSN (Multi-head) 0.852 ± 0.017 0.556 ± 0.020 0.575 ± 0.035 0.604 ± 0.026

4.2. Experiment setup
For meetup networks, Ego-Comm [37]: The nodes are users
and their friends while the edges indicate the face-to-face com-
munications. There is only one node feature: ID (we utilize one-
hot-encoding to encode the user’s ID). We divide the dataset
into 18 slices in which one piece contains the activities for one
month. We use the face-to-face communication data in the 1 − 9
months to predict the friendship ratings given in the 9th month
and use 10 − 18 months to predict the ratings provided in the
18th month. The friendship ratings scale from 0 to 10, and we set
up this case as a regression task. We denote the two experiments
as {1 − 9} → 9 and {10 − 18} → 18. To train the prediction
task, we split the dataset into 80% for training (with 20% used
for validation) and 20% for testing. InVS13 and InVS15 [38]: We
segment the co-presence data into ten slices, and each piece
represents the meetups for a working day. In the network, nodes
are the users in the workplace, and the co-presence forms edges.
The node features consist of the user’s ID (one-hot-encoding) and
the Department. The prediction goal is to use the node embedding
to predict the extent of co-occurrences of given pairs on a given
day. We categorize the number of co-presence following the 0.35
7
and 0.7 percentiles into three classes: Rare (0 − 0.35), Normal
(0.35 − 0.7), and Frequent (0.7 − 1) to make the case a classifica-
tion task. We denote the experiment as {1 − 7} → 7, indicating
using the 1st to the 7th days’ data for the 7th-day prediction. We
conduct multiple rounds of experiments as follows: {1 − 7} → 7,
{1 − 8} → 8, {1 − 9} → 9, {1 − 10} → 10. In this case, we use
80% data for training (with 20% used for validation) and 20% for
testing.
For communication networks, IARadoslawEmail [39], we di-
vide it into ten slices (one slice per month) and then organize
the link prediction tasks as follows: {1 − 5} → 6, {1 − 6} → 7,
{1 − 7} → 8, and {1 − 8} → 9. We segment DNC-Email [41]
daily and select the data from 2016-05-02 to 2016-05-09. For
simplicity, we denote 2016-05-02, 2016-05-03, . . . , 2016-05-08 as
1, 2, 3, . . . , 7 and design the following experiments: {1 − 7} → 8,
{1 − 8} → 9, {1 − 9} → 10, and {1 − 10} → 11. At last, FB-
Forum [40] has 25 weeks’ data ranging from week 19 to week
34. We slice the data weekly and ignore week 19 with only 295
records, which is exceptionally small compared to other weeks.
We set up the prediction tasks from week 20 to 27 as {1 − 4} →
5, {1 − 5} → 6, {1 − 6} → 7, and {1 − 7} → 8. Similarly, We use
80% data for training (with 20% used for validation) and 20% for
testing.
S. Min, Z. Gao, J. Peng et al. Knowledge-Based Systems 214 (2021) 106746

Table 6
ROC-AUC Score of Algorithm (Classification on IARadoslawEmail).
Baseline {1 − 5} → 6 {1 − 6} → 7 {1 − 7} → 8 {1 − 8} → 9
ROC-AUC ROC-AUC ROC-AUC ROC-AUC
GCN 0.787 ± 0.012 0.819 ± 0.006 0.820 ± 0.004 0.778 ± 0.017
CTDNE 0.748 ± 0.019 0.751 ± 0.024 0.747 ± 0.009 0.761 ± 0.014
TemporalWalk 0.817 ± 0.015 0.796 ± 0.017 0.822 ± 0.011 0.814 ± 0.023
GraphSAGE (Mean) 0.852 ± 0.009 0.845 ± 0.011 0.853 ± 0.006 0.808 ± 0.015
GraphSAGE (MaxPool) 0.839 ± 0.014 0.845 ± 0.009 0.832 ± 0.010 0.820 ± 0.008
GraphSAGE (MeanPool) 0.830 ± 0.016 0.855 ± 0.014 0.845 ± 0.006 0.798 ± 0.023
GAT (Single-head) 0.821 ± 0.012 0.812 ± 0.008 0.795 ± 0.016 0.795 ± 0.021
GAT (Multi-head) 0.824 ± 0.009 0.825 ± 0.002 0.818 ± 0.007 0.832 ± 0.015
STGSN (No Attention) 0.850 ± 0.017 0.855 ± 0.018 0.837 ± 0.009 0.815 ± 0.013
STGSN (Single-head) 0.863 ± 0.004 0.857 ± 0.013 0.861 ± 0.012 0.842 ± 0.011
STGSN (Multi-head) 0.866 ± 0.013 0.860 ± 0.025 0.863 ± 0.023 0.825 ± 0.017

Table 7
ROC-AUC Score of Algorithm (Classification on FB-Forum).
Baseline {1 − 4} → 5 {1 − 5} → 6 {1 − 6} → 7 {1 − 7} → 8
ROC-AUC ROC-AUC ROC-AUC ROC-AUC
1 GCN 0.627 ± 0.023 0.546 ± 0.013 0.610 ± 0.028 0.556 ± 0.029
CTDNE 0.816 ± 0.016 0.831 ± 0.010 0.795 ± 0.014 0.828 ± 0.015
TemporalWalk 0.831 ± 0.017 0.863 ± 0.022 0.771 ± 0.018 0.855 ± 0.017
GraphSAGE (Mean) 0.777 ± 0.015 0.810 ± 0.011 0.812 ± 0.012 0.777 ± 0.021
GraphSAGE (MaxPool) 0.815 ± 0.008 0.847 ± 0.016 0.838 ± 0.013 0.901 ± 0.014
GraphSAGE (MeanPool) 0.784 ± 0.023 0.844 ± 0.014 0.783 ± 0.030 0.757 ± 0.023
GAT (Single-head) 0.703 ± 0.021 0.707 ± 0.035 0.644 ± 0.023 0.640 ± 0.024
GAT (Multi-head) 0.684 ± 0.016 0.663 ± 0.028 0.686 ± 0.026 0.760 ± 0.019
STGSN (No Attention) 0.845 ± 0.027 0.880 ± 0.008 0.841 ± 0.013 0.913 ± 0.011
STGSN (Single-head) 0.853 ± 0.017 0.880 ± 0.011 0.859 ± 0.009 0.916 ± 0.012
STGSN (Multi-head) 0.854 ± 0.031 0.930 ± 0.026 0.869 ± 0.025 0.841 ± 0.016

4.3. Baselines the node embeddings by applying an extra-layer attention

In the experiments, we compare our method with five state-
of-the-art methods: GCN [8], CTDNE [9], TemporalWalk [9],
GraphSAGE [10], and GAT [11]. We apply three different aggre-
gation strategies: Mean, MeanPool, MaxPool on GraphSAGE, and
single-head and multi-head attention mechanisms on GAT. The
baselines are as follows:
1. GCN [8]: Like CNN, GCN learns the target node’s features
by performing convolutional operations on the neighbor-
ing cells. As a typical spectral-based approach, the model
generally assumes fixed graphs as input. It is not very suit-
able for modeling time-evolving networks that frequently
encounter unseen nodes.
2. CTDNE: CTDNE [9] is a general random walk-based frame-
work for incorporating temporal information into network
embedding from continuous-time dynamic networks. It is
worth comparing our method against it because it is also
a deep learning model considering the network’s temporal
aspects.
3. TemporalWalk [9]: This model is a temporal walk version
of CTDNE. When applying random walks, CTDNE (static
random walks) specifies the number of walks to run per
node in the graph. In contrast, TemporalWalk (temporal
random walks) defines the number of context windows we
are interested in obtaining.
4. GraphSAGE: The model [10] is a general inductive embed-
ding framework that effectively aggregates features from
a node’s local neighbors and generates embeddings for
previously unseen data. In our experiments, we apply this
method to aggregate all neighbors as a whole without
considering any temporal characteristics. For aggregation
strategy, we adopt Mean (average), MeanPool (element-
wise mean), and MaxPool (element-wise max).
5. GAT: Instead of paying equal attention to all the neigh-
bors during the embedding process, GAT [11] computes
8
strategy, which implicitly assigning different weights to
different neighbors. For GAT experiments, we use it for the
spatial-neighbor embeddings with both single-head and
multi-head attentions.
4.4. Effectiveness of the proposed method
To evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed method, we
compare the popular methods: GCN [8], CTDNE [9], Temporal-
Walk [9], GraphSage [10] and GAT [11] to STGSN on all six
datasets. As shown in Tables 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, we can make the
following observations:
1. STGSN outperforms the-state-of-art methods when the
network has temporal attributes. On all six datasets,
STGSN has the best over-all results. Except for one case of
second place, STGSN wins all the cases. For meetup net-
works, in the case of Ego-Comm, it produces MAE of 2.068
and MSE of 6.265 for {1 − 9} → 9. For {10 − 18} → 18,
STGSN offers the best results — MAE: 1.730 and MSE: 5.302.
For InVS13 and InVS15, except for {1 − 9} → 10 in InVS15,
our method has the second-best F1 score: 0.631, while
GraphSage (Mean) produced the best: 0.636. In all other
cases, our method yields the best F1 scores: 0.589, 0.525,
0.590, 0.652 for InVS13 and 0.852, 0.573, 0.578, 0.631 (2nd
place) for InVS15. For all the communication networks,
STGSN outperforms all of the baselines by a significant
margin, and it produces the best ROC-AUC values: 0.866,
0.860, 0.863, and 0.842 for IARadoslawEmail, 0.854, 0.930,
0.869, and 0.916 for FB-Forum. Finally, 0.971, 0.952, 0.959,
and 0.959 for DNC-Email. We look into the results from the
following aspects:
(a) STGSN is the best-performed algorithm on all
datasets. It performs the best on both meetup and
communication networks. The results prove that our
S. Min, Z. Gao, J. Peng et al. Knowledge-Based Systems 214 (2021) 106746

Table 8
ROC-AUC Score of Algorithm (Classification on DNC-Email).
Baseline {1 − 7} → 8 {1 − 8} → 9 {1 − 9} → 10 {1 − 10} → 11
ROC-AUC ROC-AUC ROC-AUC ROC-AUC
GCN 0.677 ± 0.027 0.654 ± 0.019 0.6484 ± 0.021 0.623 ± 0.016
CTDNE 0.894 ± 0.013 0.891 ± 0.022 0.904 ± 0.017 0.911 ± 0.011
TemporalWalk 0.834 ± 0.015 0.817 ± 0.019 0.848 ± 0.007 0.868 ± 0.014
GraphSAGE (Mean) 0.848 ± 0.011 0.856 ± 0.017 0.831 ± 0.008 0.797 ± 0.025
GraphSAGE (MaxPool) 0.884 ± 0.013 0.914 ± 0.009 0.907 ± 0.014 0.927 ± 0.022
GraphSAGE (MeanPool) 0.860 ± 0.015 0.868 ± 0.016 0.869 ± 0.011 0.858 ± 0.012
GAT (Single-head) 0.813 ± 0.024 0.868 ± 0.018 0.798 ± 0.012 0.915 ± 0.012
GAT (Multi-head) 0.910 ± 0.017 0.885 ± 0.016 0.832 ± 0.023 0.830 ± 0.011
STGSN (No Attention) 0.940 ± 0.024 0.922 ± 0.027 0.914 ± 0.025 0.909 ± 0.016
STGSN (Single-head) 0.971 ± 0.010 0.945 ± 0.011 0.959 ± 0.014 0.959 ± 0.013
STGSN (Multi-head) 0.968 ± 0.018 0.952 ± 0.018 0.950 ± 0.009 0.919 ± 0.026

method has powerful capabilities of modeling social
networks with temporal characteristics.
(b) It is worth pointing out that STGSN, in particular,
has superior performance on communication net-
works: IARadoslawEmail, FB-Forum, and DNC-Email.
It indicates that the temporal patterns are crucial
for communication networks (email and comment
exchanges). For example, to answer questions like:
will two people email each other in a few days. The
answer may heavily depend on if they had email ex-
changes recently. In this case, the recent time steps
are more important than the historical ones. It shows
that our method can robustly capture the influential
temporal patterns by slicing the network interac-
tions in time steps and paying weighted attention to
them.
(c) Attention plays a critical role in our framework. It is
noticeable that STGSN without attention mechanism,
namely STGSN (No Attention), performs not as good
as STGSN models with attention. It even produces
the worst performance in the Ego-Comm case. Com-
pared to the methods, like GraphSAGE, that looking
at the network structure as a whole, learning the
node representation in time-slice fashion without
attention is not much improvement. Moreover, if we
apply the time-segmentation incautiously, the node-
aggregation approach may even yield unsatisfactory
performance.
2. STGSN with single-head and multi-head attention has
not much difference w.r.t performance. In our exper-
iments, we have tried both single-head and multi-head
setup. The outcomes indicate that our method generally
achieves the same performance level with multi-head at-
tention and single-head attention, which implies that mul-
tiple attention heads have no better capability of seizing
more hidden information of temporal characteristics as
expected. In study [42] and [43], the authors observe some
similar phenomena that multi-heads are not necessarily
better than single-head attentions and pruning the vast
majority of heads can still obtain a decent performance
level. How multiple heads can affect performance in social
networks analysis? It is a promising future research direc-
tion that is worth further exploring. We consider this topic
is beyond our research scope and decide to focus on our
goal — modeling time-evolving social networks. As shown
in Tables 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, we list the scores produced by
STGSN with both single-head and multi-head attentions. In
practice, we choose the single-head setting, which achieves
the same level of performance as the multi-head setup but
with much less computational overhead.
9
3. The temporal importance distribution varies from case
to case in time-evolving social networks. In our exper-
iments, we closely look into how attention distributions
vary in different cases. It is noticeable that the temporal
attentions are distributed differently in various scenarios.
For example, Fig. 4(a) shows a friendship prediction in the
9th month based on the 1st to 9th months’ face-to-face
communications. The attention weights are increasing from
0.095 (Month 1) to 0.147 (Month 9) chronologically, which
shows an increasing-trend pattern that the more recent
the month is, the more decisive influence it contributes. In
contrast, Fig. 4(b) is one example of FB-Forum indicating a
decreasing-trend pattern. Furthermore, Fig. 4(c) and 4(d)
demonstrates a seasonal pattern. In Fig. 4(c), every sec-
ond day shows a more substantial influence. Meanwhile,
Fig. 4(d) shows a co-presence prediction on Friday is in-
fluenced mostly by the previous Fridays. Two Fridays have
attention weights 0.192 and 0.126, respectively, which are
significantly more influential than all other weekdays. At
last, Fig. 4(e) and Fig. 4(f) are the key-player(s) pattern. As
shown in Fig. 4(e), this example in FB-Forum has week 2
with the most prominent contribution. In this case, there is
only one key player: week 2. In contrast, the InVS13 exam-
ple in Fig. 4(f) has multiple key time steps: two Tuesdays
and a Friday as key players.
Unlike some models used in a low-risk environment, where
a mistake will not have serious consequences, in our case,
it is not enough for the police officers to know just the
prediction (what). The model must demonstrate how it
comes to the prediction (why). Therefore, when show-
ing the prediction result, we also designed a visualization
tool to show the temporal attention distribution (chart
and pattern class), which is proven to be very helpful in
practice. By doing this, the officers can use the prediction
(what + why) as assistance and combine it with his domain
knowledge to make the final call.
5. Conclusion and future work
In this paper, we propose a spatial–temporal graph neural
network: STGSN for social networks specifically. The proposed
framework firstly utilizes the graph embedding approach to ag-
gregate the neighborhood information for the target nodes. Sec-
ondly, we introduce a novel attention mechanism to build a
temporal context, enabling the algorithm to pay weighted at-
tention to different time steps. Thirdly, we devise a method
to improve the interpretation ability of the model. Finally, the
algorithm combines the spatial and temporal features for the
downstream prediction tasks. We conducted extensive experi-
ments on six public datasets. The results show that the proposed
framework outperforms state-of-the-art methods by producing
S. Min, Z. Gao, J. Peng et al.
Fig. 4. Attention Distribution Examples.
significantly better performance in the downstream prediction
tasks.
Some possible future research directions are: Devising a better
graph representation method that fully considers the neighbor-
hood’s node ID, node attributes, and edge attributes. Develop an
optimized time-slicing method for better temporal segmentation.
CRediT authorship contribution statement
Shengjie Min: Conceptualization, Methodology, Writing -
original draft, Software. Zhan Gao: Conceptualization, Writing
- original draft, Software. Jing Peng: Writing - original draft,
Software. Liang Wang: Software, Visualization, Investigation. Ke
Qin: Writing - review & editing. Bo Fang: Data curation, Software,
Visualization.
Declaration of competing interest
The authors declare that they have no known competing finan-
cial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared
to influence the work reported in this paper.
Acknowledgments
We thank the Sichuan Provincial Public Security Department
experts, who provided insight and expertise that greatly assisted
10
Knowledge-Based Systems 214 (2021) 106746
the research. Sichuan Provincial Public Security Department sup-
ported this work under the Intelligence Command Operational
Platform Program.
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