On the Cross-Graph Transferability of Dynamic Link Prediction

Dynamic link prediction aims to predict the future links on dynamic graphs, which can be applied to wide scenarios such as recommender systems and social networks on the World Wide Web. Existing methods mainly (1) focus on the in-graph learning, which cannot generalize to graphs unobserved during training; or (2) achieve the cross-graph predictions in a many-many mechanism by training on multiple graphs across various domains, which results in a large computational cost. In this paper, we propose a cross-graph dynamic link predictor named CrossDyG, which achieves the cross-graph transferability in a one-many mechanism which trains on one single source graph and test on different target graphs. Specifically, we provide causal and empirical analysis on the structural bias caused by the graph-specific structural characteristics in cross-graph predictions. Then, we conduct deconfounded training to learn the universal network evolution pattern from one single source graph during training. Finally, we apply the causal intervention to leverage the graph-specific structural characteristics of each target graph during inference. Extensive experiments conducted on three benchmark data of dynamic graphs demonstrate that CrossDyG outperforms the state-of-the-art baselines by up to 11.01% and 17.02% in terms of AP and AUC, respectively. In addition, the improvements are especially significant when training on small source graphs. The implementation of our approach is available in https://anonymous.4open.science/r/CrossDyG-8B70 .