Dynamic networks are used in a wide range of fields, including social network analysis, recommender systems and epidemiology. Representing complex networks as structures changing over time allow network models to leverage not only structural but also temporal patterns. However, as dynamic network literature stems from diverse fields and makes use of inconsistent terminology, it is challenging to navigate. Meanwhile, graph neural networks (GNNs) have gained a lot of attention in recent years for their ability to perform well on a range of network science tasks, such as link prediction and node classification. Despite the popularity of graph neural networks and the proven benefits of dynamic network models, there has been little focus on graph neural networks for dynamic networks. To address the challenges resulting from the fact that this research crosses diverse fields as well as to survey dynamic graph neural networks, this work is split into two main parts. First, to address the ambiguity of the dynamic network terminology we establish a foundation of dynamic networks with consistent, detailed terminology and notation. Second, we present a comprehensive survey of dynamic graph neural network models using the proposed terminology.

Neural architecture search (NAS) has attracted much attention and has been illustrated to bring tangible benefits in a large number of applications in the past few years. Architecture topology and architecture size have been regarded as two of the most important aspects for the performance of deep learning models and the community has spawned lots of searching algorithms for both of those aspects of the neural architectures. However, the performance gain from these searching algorithms is achieved under different search spaces and training setups. This makes the overall performance of the algorithms incomparable and the improvement from a sub-module of the searching model unclear. In this paper, we propose NATS-Bench, a unified benchmark on searching for both topology and size, for (almost) any up-to-date algorithm. NATS-Bench includes the search space of 15,625 neural cell candidates for architecture topology and 32,768 for architecture size on three datasets. We analyze the validity of our benchmark in terms of various criteria and performance comparison of all candidates in the search space. We show the versatility of NATS-Bench by benchmarking 13 recent state-of-the-art NAS algorithms. This facilitates a much larger community of researchers to focus on developing better algorithms in a more comparable environment.

The world of network science is fascinating and filled with complex phenomena that we aspire to understand. One of them is the dynamics of spreading processes over complex networked structures. Building the knowledge-base in the field where we can face more than one spreading process propagating over a network that has more than one layer is a challenging task, as the complexity comes both from the environment in which the spread happens and from characteristics and interplay of spreads’ propagation. As this cross-disciplinary field bringing together computer science, network science, biology and physics has rapidly grown over the last decade, there is a need to comprehensively review the current state-of-the-art and offer to the research community a roadmap that helps to organise the future research in this area. Thus, this survey is a first attempt to present the current landscape of the multi-processes spread over multilayer networks and to suggest the potential ways forward.

This paper aims to provide a comprehensive critical overview on how entities and their interactions in Complex Networked Systems (CNS) are modelled across disciplines as they approach their ultimate goal of creating a Digital Twin (DT) that perfectly matches the reality. We propose four complexity dimensions for the network representation and five generations of models for the dynamics modelling to describe the increasing complexity level of the CNS that will be developed towards achieving DT (e.g. CNS dynamics modelled offline in the 1st generation v.s. CNS dynamics modelled simultaneously with a two-way real time feedback between reality and the CNS in the 5th generation). Based on that, we propose a new framework to conceptually compare diverse existing modelling paradigms from different perspectives and create unified assessment criteria to evaluate their respective capabilities of reaching such an ultimate goal. Using the proposed criteria, we also appraise how far the reviewed current state-of-the-art approaches are from the idealised DTs. Finally, we identify and propose potential directions and ways of building a DT-orientated CNS based on the convergence and integration of CNS and DT utilising a variety of cross-disciplinary techniques.

In collaborative Web-based platforms, user reputation scores are generally computed according to two orthogonal perspectives: (a) helpfulness-based reputation (HBR) scores and (b) centrality-based reputation (CBR) scores. In HBR approaches, the most reputable users are those who post the most helpful reviews according to the opinion of the members of their community. In CBR approaches, a “who-trusts-whom” network—known as a trust network —is available and the most reputable users occupy the most central position in the trust network, according to some definition of centrality. The identification of users featuring large HBR scores is one of the most important research issue in the field of Social Networks, and it is a critical success factor of many Web-based platforms like e-marketplaces, product review Web sites, and question-and-answering systems. Unfortunately, user reviews/ratings are often sparse, and this makes the calculation of HBR scores inaccurate. In contrast, CBR scores are relatively easy to calculate provided that the topology of the trust network is known. In this article, we investigate if CBR scores are effective to predict HBR ones, and, to perform our study, we used real-life datasets extracted from CIAO and Epinions (two product review Web sites) and Wikipedia and applied five popular centrality measures—Degree Centrality, Closeness Centrality, Betweenness Centrality, PageRank and Eigenvector Centrality—to calculate CBR scores. Our analysis provides a positive answer to our research question: CBR scores allow for predicting HBR ones and Eigenvector Centrality was found to be the most important predictor. Our findings prove that we can leverage trust relationships to spot those users producing the most helpful reviews for the whole community.