Quantifying the structural and functional differences of temporal networks remains a fundamental and challenging problem in the era of big data. Traditional network comparison methods, originally developed for static networks, often fall short in capturing the intricate interplay between structural configurations and dynamic temporal patterns inherent in complex systems. This work proposes a temporal dissimilarity measure for temporal network comparison based on the first arrival distance distribution and spectral entropy based Jensen-Shannon divergence. Experimental results on both synthetic and empirical temporal networks show that the proposed measure could discriminate diverse temporal networks with different structures by capturing various topological and temporal properties. Moreover, the proposed measure can discern the functional distinctions and is found effective applications in temporal network classification and spreadability discrimination.

Temporal networks refer to networks like physical contact networks whose topology changes over time. Predicting future temporal network is crucial e.g., to forecast the epidemics. Existing prediction methods are either relatively accurate but black-box, or white-box but less accurate. The lack of interpretable and accurate prediction methods motivates us to explore what intrinsic properties/mechanisms facilitate the prediction of temporal networks. We use interpretable learning algorithms, Lasso Regression and Random Forest, to predict, based on the current activities (i.e., connected or not) of all links, the activity of each link at the next time step. From the coefficients learned from each algorithm, we construct the prediction backbone network that presents the influence of all links in determining each links future activity. Analysis of the backbone, its relation to the link activity time series and to the time aggregated network reflects which properties of temporal networks are captured by the learning algorithms. Via six real-world contact networks, we find that the next step activity of a particular link is mainly influenced by (a) its current activity and (b) links strongly correlated in the time series to that particular link and close in distance (in hops) in the aggregated network.