GC-LSTM: graph convolution embedded LSTM for dynamic network link prediction

Abstract

Dynamic network link prediction is becoming a hot topic in network science, due to its wide applications in biology, sociology, economy and industry. However, it is a challenge since network structure evolves with time, making long-term prediction of adding/deleting links especially difficult. Inspired by the great success of deep learning frameworks, especially the convolution neural network (CNN) and long short-term memory (LSTM) network, we propose a novel end-to-end model with a Graph Convolution Network(GCN) embedded LSTM, named GC-LSTM, for dynamic network link prediction. Thereinto, LSTM is adopted as the main framework to learn the temporal features of all snapshots of a dynamic network. While for each snapshot, GCN is applied to capture the local structural properties of nodes as well as the relationship between them. One benefit is that our GC-LSTM can predict both added and removed links, making it more practical in reality, while most existing dynamic link prediction methods can only handle removed links. Extensive experiments demonstrated that GC-LSTM achieves outstanding performance and outperforms existing state-of-the-art methods.