Towards Temporal Edge Regression: A Case Study on Agriculture Trade Between Nations

Abstract

Recently, Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have shown promising performance in tasks on dynamic graphs such as node classification, link prediction and graph regression. However, few work has studied the temporal edge regression task which has important real-world applications. In this paper, we explore the application of GNNs to edge regression tasks in both static and dynamic settings, focusing on predicting food and agriculture trade values between nations. We introduce three simple yet strong baselines and comprehensively evaluate one static and three dynamic GNN models using the UN Trade dataset. Our experimental results reveal that the baselines exhibit remarkably strong performance across various settings, highlighting the inadequacy of existing GNNs. We also find that TGN outperforms other GNN models, suggesting TGN is a more appropriate choice for edge regression tasks. Moreover, we note that the proportion of negative edges in the training samples significantly affects the test performance. The companion source code can be found at: https://github.com/scylj1/GNN_Edge_Regression.