Which links should I use? A variogram-based selection of relationship measures for prediction of node attributes in temporal multigraphs

When faced with the task of forming predictions for nodes in a social network, it can be quite difficult to decide which of the available connections among nodes should be used for the best results. This problem is further exacerbated when temporal information is available, prompting the question of whether this information should be aggregated or not, and if not, which portions of it should be used. With this challenge in mind, we propose a novel utilization of variograms for selecting potentially useful relationship types, whose merits are then evaluated using a Gaussian Conditional Random Field model for node attribute prediction of temporal social networks with a multigraph structure. Our flexible model allows for measuring many kinds of relationships between nodes in the network that evolve over time, as well as using those relationships to augment the outputs of various unstructured predictors to further improve performance. The experimental results exhibit the effectiveness of using particular relationships to boost performance of unstructured predictors, show that using other relationships could actually impede performance, and also indicate that while variograms alone are not necessarily sufficient to identify a useful relationship, they greatly help in removing obviously useless measures, and can be combined with intuition to identify the optimal relationships.