Deep Temporal Graph Clustering

TL;DR

This paper introduces TGC, a novel framework for deep clustering of temporal graphs that preserves dynamic interaction information and improves performance over static graph approaches.

Contribution

The paper proposes a general deep clustering framework specifically designed for temporal graphs, addressing the loss of dynamic information in static processing.

Findings

Temporal graph clustering offers better flexibility in time-space trade-offs.

TGC significantly improves clustering performance on temporal graph datasets.

The framework effectively enhances existing temporal graph learning methods.

Abstract

Deep graph clustering has recently received significant attention due to its ability to enhance the representation learning capabilities of models in unsupervised scenarios. Nevertheless, deep clustering for temporal graphs, which could capture crucial dynamic interaction information, has not been fully explored. It means that in many clustering-oriented real-world scenarios, temporal graphs can only be processed as static graphs. This not only causes the loss of dynamic information but also triggers huge computational consumption. To solve the problem, we propose a general framework for deep Temporal Graph Clustering called TGC, which introduces deep clustering techniques to suit the interaction sequence-based batch-processing pattern of temporal graphs. In addition, we discuss differences between temporal graph clustering and static graph clustering from several levels. To verify the superiority of the proposed framework TGC, we conduct extensive experiments. The experimental results show that temporal graph clustering enables more flexibility in finding a balance between time and space requirements, and our framework can effectively improve the performance of existing temporal graph learning methods. The code is released: https://github.com/MGitHubL/Deep-Temporal-Graph-Clustering.