Do Temporal Link Predictors Need Learned Memory? A Smoothed-Count Baseline with a Handful of Parameters

Lisi Qarkaxhija, Ingo Scholtes

Many temporal link predictors summarize past interactions through learned node representations. We examine whether simple counts of recurring interaction patterns can provide competitive predictions without learning these representations. We propose a temporal link predictor based on statistical language modelling. It pools transition and co-occurrence counts across sources to predict links that a source has never formed. We smooth sparse estimates using destination frequencies or Kneser-Ney continuation counts. A shared log-linear rule combines these estimates with popularity, source history, and recency, without node embeddings. In our main evaluation, the model achieves the highest MRR among the compared methods on 7 out of 16 datasets from TGB and TGB-Seq. It also outperforms EdgeBank and Base3 on all 16 datasets and the heuristic family on 14. These gains extend to datasets designed to limit repeated edges. With only 9--13 learned parameters, our model provides a simple and competitive baseline for evaluating future neural temporal link predictors.