Learning, analyzing and predicting object roles on dynamic networks

Dynamic networks are structures with objects and links between the objects that vary in time. Temporal information in dynamic networks can be used to reveal many important phenomena such as bursts of activities in social networks and human communication patterns in email networks. In this area, one very important problem is to understand dynamic patterns of object roles. For instance, will a user become a peripheral node in a social network? Could a website become a hub on the Internet? Will a gene be highly expressed in gene-gene interaction networks in the later stage of a cancer? In this paper, we propose a novel approach that identifies the role of each object, tracks the changes of object roles over time, and predicts the evolving patterns of the object roles in dynamic networks. In particular, a probability model is proposed to extract latent features of object roles from dynamic networks. The extracted latent features are discriminative in learning object roles and are capable of characterizing network structures. The probability model is then extended to learn the dynamic patterns and make predictions on object roles. We assess our method on two data sets on the tasks of exploring how users' importance and political interests evolve as time progresses on dynamic networks. Overall, the extensive experimental evaluations confirm the effectiveness of our approach for identifying, analyzing and predicting object roles on dynamic networks.