Dynamic Representation Learning with Temporal Point Processes for Higher-Order Interaction Forecasting

The explosion of digital information and the growing involvement of people in social networks led to enormous research activity to develop methods that can extract meaningful information from interaction data. Commonly, interactions are represented by edges in a network or a graph, which implicitly assumes that the interactions are pairwise and static. However, real-world interactions deviate from these assumptions: (i) interactions can be multi-way, involving more than two nodes or individuals (e.g., family relationships, protein interactions), and (ii) interactions can change over a period of time (e.g., change of opinions and friendship status). While pairwise interactions have been studied in a dynamic network setting and multi-way interactions have been studied using hypergraphs in static networks, there exists no method, at present, that can predict multi-way interactions or hyperedges in dynamic settings. Existing related methods cannot answer temporal queries like what type of interaction will occur next and when it will occur. This paper proposes a temporal point process model for hyperedge prediction to address these problems. Our proposed model uses dynamic representation learning techniques for nodes in a neural point process framework to forecast hyperedges. We present several experimental results and set benchmark results. As far as our knowledge, this is the first work that uses the temporal point process to forecast hyperedges in dynamic networks.