TEDIC: Neural Modeling of Behavioral Patterns in Dynamic Social Interaction Networks

Dynamic social interaction networks are an important abstraction to model time-stamped social interactions such as eye contact, speaking and listening between people. These networks typically contain informative while subtle patterns that reflect people’s social characters and relationship, and therefore attract the attentions of a lot of social scientists and computer scientists. Previous approaches on extracting those patterns primarily rely on sophisticated expert knowledge of psychology and social science, and the obtained features are often overly task-specific. More generic models based on representation learning of dynamic networks may be applied, but the unique properties of social interactions cause severe model mismatch and degenerate the quality of the obtained representations. Here we fill this gap by proposing a novel framework, termed TEmporal network-DIffusion Convolutional networks (TEDIC), for generic representation learning on dynamic social interaction networks. We make TEDIC a good fit by designing two components: 1) Adopt diffusion of node attributes over a combination of the original network and its complement to capture long-hop interactive patterns embedded in the behaviors of people making or avoiding contact; 2) Leverage temporal convolution networks with hierarchical set-pooling operation to flexibly extract patterns from different-length interactions scattered over a long time span. The design also endows TEDIC with certain self-explaining power. We evaluate TEDIC over five real datasets for four different social character prediction tasks including deception detection, dominance identification, nervousness detection and community detection. TEDIC not only consistently outperforms previous SOTA’s, but also provides two important pieces of social insight. In addition, it exhibits favorable societal characteristics by remaining unbiased to people from different regions. Our project website is: http://snap.stanford.edu/tedic/.