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Main Authors: Cornell, Filip, Smirnov, Oleg, Gandler, Gabriela Zarzar, Cao, Lele
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
Subjects:
Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2502.04910
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author Cornell, Filip
Smirnov, Oleg
Gandler, Gabriela Zarzar
Cao, Lele
author_facet Cornell, Filip
Smirnov, Oleg
Gandler, Gabriela Zarzar
Cao, Lele
contents Dynamic graph datasets often exhibit strong temporal patterns, such as recency, which prioritizes recent interactions, and popularity, which favors frequently occurring nodes. We demonstrate that simple heuristics leveraging only these patterns can perform on par or outperform state-of-the-art neural network models under standard evaluation protocols. To further explore these dynamics, we introduce metrics that quantify the impact of recency and popularity across datasets. Our experiments on BenchTemp and the Temporal Graph Benchmark show that our approaches achieve state-of-the-art performance across all datasets in the latter and secure top ranks on multiple datasets in the former. These results emphasize the importance of refined evaluation schemes to enable fair comparisons and promote the development of more robust temporal graph models. Additionally, they reveal that current deep learning methods often struggle to capture the key patterns underlying predictions in real-world temporal graphs. For reproducibility, we have made our code publicly available.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2502_04910
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle On the Power of Heuristics in Temporal Graphs
Cornell, Filip
Smirnov, Oleg
Gandler, Gabriela Zarzar
Cao, Lele
Machine Learning
Dynamic graph datasets often exhibit strong temporal patterns, such as recency, which prioritizes recent interactions, and popularity, which favors frequently occurring nodes. We demonstrate that simple heuristics leveraging only these patterns can perform on par or outperform state-of-the-art neural network models under standard evaluation protocols. To further explore these dynamics, we introduce metrics that quantify the impact of recency and popularity across datasets. Our experiments on BenchTemp and the Temporal Graph Benchmark show that our approaches achieve state-of-the-art performance across all datasets in the latter and secure top ranks on multiple datasets in the former. These results emphasize the importance of refined evaluation schemes to enable fair comparisons and promote the development of more robust temporal graph models. Additionally, they reveal that current deep learning methods often struggle to capture the key patterns underlying predictions in real-world temporal graphs. For reproducibility, we have made our code publicly available.
title On the Power of Heuristics in Temporal Graphs
topic Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2502.04910