TATKC: A Temporal Graph Neural Network for Fast Approximate Temporal Katz Centrality Ranking

Numerous real-world networks are represented as temporal graphs, which capture the dynamics of connections over time. Identifying important nodes on temporal graphs has a plethora of real-life applications, such as information propagation and influential user identification, etc. Temporal Katz centrality, a popular temporal metric, gauges the importance of nodes by taking into account both the number of temporal walks and the timespan between the interactions. The computation of traditional temporal Katz centrality is computationally expensive, especially when applied to massive temporal graphs. Therefore, in this paper, we design a temporal graph neural network to approximate temporal Katz centrality computation. To the best of our knowledge, we are the first to address temporal Katz centrality computation purely from a learning-based perspective. We propose a time-injected self-attention model that consists of two phases. In the first phase, we utilize a time-injected self-attention mechanism to acquire node representations that encompass both structural information and temporal relevance. The second phase is structured as a multi-layer perceptron (MLP) which uses the learned node representation to predict node rankings. Furthermore, normalization and neighbor sampling strategies are integrated into the model to enhance its overall performance. Extensive experiments on real-world networks demonstrate the efficiency and accuracy of TATKC.