CLGNN: A Contrastive Learning-based GNN Model for Betweenness Centrality Prediction on Temporal Graphs

Abstract

Temporal Betweenness Centrality (TBC) measures how often a node appears on optimal temporal paths, reflecting its importance in temporal networks. However, exact computation is highly expensive, and real-world TBC distributions are extremely imbalanced. The severe imbalance leads learning-based models to overfit to zero-centrality nodes, resulting in inaccurate TBC predictions and failure to identify truly central nodes. Existing graph neural network (GNN) methods either fail to handle such imbalance or ignore temporal dependencies altogether. To address these issues, we propose a scalable and inductive contrastive learning-based GNN (CLGNN) for accurate and efficient TBC prediction. CLGNN builds an instance graph to preserve path validity and temporal order, then encodes structural and temporal features using dual aggregation, i.e., mean and edge-to-node multi-head attention mechanisms, enhanced by temporal path count and time encodings. A stability-based clustering-guided contrastive module (KContrastNet) is introduced to separate high-, median-, and low-centrality nodes in representation space, mitigating class imbalance, while a regression module (ValueNet) estimates TBC values. CLGNN also supports multiple optimal path definitions to accommodate diverse temporal semantics. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of CLGNN across diverse benchmarks. CLGNN achieves up to a 663.7~$\times$ speedup compared to state-of-the-art exact TBC computation methods. It outperforms leading static GNN baselines with up to 31.4~$\times$ lower MAE and 16.7~$\times$ higher Spearman correlation, and surpasses state-of-the-art temporal GNNs with up to 5.7~$\times$ lower MAE and 3.9~$\times$ higher Spearman correlation.