Using Motif Transitions for Temporal Graph Generation

Abstract

Graph generative models are highly important for sharing surrogate data and benchmarking purposes. Real-world complex systems often exhibit dynamic nature, where the interactions among nodes change over time in the form of a temporal network. Most temporal network generation models extend the static graph generation models by incorporating temporality in the generation process. More recently, temporal motifs are used to generate temporal networks with better success. However, existing models are often restricted to a small set of predefined motif patterns due to the high computational cost of counting temporal motifs. In this work, we develop a practical temporal graph generator, Motif Transition Model (MTM), to generate synthetic temporal networks with realistic global and local features. Our key idea is modeling the arrival of new events as temporal motif transition processes. We first calculate the transition properties from the input graph and then simulate the motif transition processes based on the transition probabilities and transition rates. We demonstrate that our model consistently outperforms the baselines with respect to preserving various global and local temporal graph statistics and runtime performance.