Structural similarity based link prediction in social networks using firefly algorithm

Link prediction in social networks has a long history in complex network research area. The formation of links in networks has been approached by scientists from different backgrounds, ranging from physics to computer science. To predict the formation of new links, we consider measures which originate from network science and use them in the place of mass and distance within the formalism of Newton’s Gravitational Law. The attraction force calculated in this way is treated as a proxy for the likelihood of link formation. In particular, we use three different measures of vertex centrality as mass, and 13 dissimilarity measures including shortest path and inverse Katz score in place of distance, leading to over 50 combinations that we evaluate empirically. Combining these through gravitational law allows us to couple popularity with similarity, two important characteristics for link prediction in social networks. Performance of our predictors is evaluated using Area Under the Precision–Recall Curve (AUC) for seven different real-world network datasets. The experiments demonstrate that this approach tends to outperform the setting in which vertex similarity measures like Katz are used on their own. Our approach also gives us the opportunity to combine network’s global and local properties for predicting future or missing links. Our study shows that the use of the physical law which combines node importance with measures quantifying how distant the nodes are, is a promising research direction in social link prediction.

In some online Social Network Services, users are allowed to label their relationship with others, which can be represented as links with signed values. The link prediction problem is to estimate the values of unknown links by the information from the social network. A lot of similarity based metrics and machine learning based methods are proposed. Most of these methods are based on the network topological and node states. In this paper, by considering the information from user comment and sentiment lexicon, our methods improved the performances of link prediction for both similarity based metrics and machine learning based methods.KeywordsLink predictionSocial networksLink network structureUser commentsSentiment lexicon

Link prediction in multilayer networks using weighted reliable local random walk algorithm

On-line social networks (OSNs) often contain many different types of relationships between users. When studying the structure of OSNs such as Facebook, two of the most commonly studied networks are friendship and interaction networks. The link prediction problem in friendship networks has been heavily studied. There has also been prior work on link prediction in interaction networks,independent of friendship networks. In this paper, we study the predictive power of combining friendship and interaction networks. We hypothesize that, by leveraging friendship networks, we can improve the accuracy of link prediction in interaction networks. We augment several interaction link prediction algorithms to incorporate friendships and predicted friendships. From experiments on Facebook data, we find that incorporating friendships into interaction link prediction algorithms results in higher accuracy, but incorporating predicted friendships does not when compared to incorporating current friendships.

Combining contextual, temporal and topological information for unsupervised link prediction in social networks

Social network analysis is an approach to the study of social structures. One of the important fields in social networks analyses is link prediction. Link prediction tries to reach an appropriate answer to this question: what kinds of interaction among members of a network would possible form in future, given a snapshot of the network in current time. The main purpose of this paper is to boost the performance of similarity based link prediction methods by using community information. This information is derived from the structure of the graph, based on the number of community levels that two vertices have in common, in a hierarchical representation of communities. To evaluate the performance of the proposed method, four datasets are used as benchmark. The results suggest that the information of communities often increases the efficiency and accuracy of link prediction.

Social network analysis has recently attracted lots of attention among researchers due to its wide applicability in capturing social interactions. Link prediction, related to the likelihood of having a link between two nodes of the network that are not connected, is a key problem in social network analysis. Many methods have been proposed to solve the problem. Among these methods, similarity-based methods exhibit good efficiency by considering the network structure and using as a fundamental criterion the number of common neighbours between two nodes to establish structural similarity. High structural similarity may suggest that a link between two nodes is likely to appear. However, as shown in the paper, the number of common neighbours may not be always sufficient to provide comprehensive information about structural similarity between a pair of nodes. To address this, a neighbourhood vector is first specified for each node. Then, a novel measure is proposed to determine the similarity of each pair of nodes based on the number of common neighbours and correlation between the neighbourhood vectors of the nodes Experimental results, on a range of different real-world networks, suggest that the proposed method results in higher accuracy than other state-of-the-art similarity-based methods for link prediction.

Understanding the evolution of dynamic network structures is an emerging and very interesting topic, which is motivated by several real applications in many scientific fields. In this article, we discuss the link prediction problem, which is one of the key issues in the analysis of social evolving networks. We propose a new hybrid approach to predict the connections in social networks. The approach is inspired from the particle swarm algorithm and is combined with supervised machine learning strategy into a hybrid system. The paper includes an experimental study using real world data sets to compare the proposed methods against other approaches. The obtained results show good performance and prove the effectiveness of the proposed method.

Human networks in general, and social networks in particular, have been demonstrated to be highly structured and easily decomposable into communities. As a consequence, it appeared natural to us to consider this inherent trait of social networks in order to better the hidden link prediction problem’s resolution. In this paper, we propose a supervised learning algorithm that incorporates community information as a feature alongside other similarity metrics. The objective is to show that the information about the network’s community structure will enhance the accuracy of the hidden link prediction in social networks. We tested the F1-score accuracy of the proposed model with four classifiers: SVM with an “rbf” kernel, Naive Bayes, random forest and K-NN. Experimental results demonstrate that the inclusion of community information can only improve the quality of the hidden link prediction.KeywordsLink predictionSocial networksCommunity detectionSupervised learning

Prediction of links/ connections in social networks is useful for increasing business in the area of telecom and social media. All types of social networking organization are trying to increase their nodes, i.e. the number of members. So the calculation of link prediction is the most important task because this calculation will help how to increase the number of user on a social network. A new technique of link prediction, namely RSM index, is introduced in this paper. Few essential properties have been established. Also, a comparative study with the existing methods is depicted with suitable tables and graphs.

Link prediction aims to find the missing link in current networks or estimate the likelihood the link will appear in the future. In many real-world scenarios, networks can be massive and drastically evolving. Many recent works concentrated on how to solve the procession of massive data, which cares less about the effects of the temporal information. In some dynamic networks, the edge that appears a long time ago will have fewer effects on the appearance of edges in the future. The accuracy of link prediction in dynamic networks can be further improved by adding temporal information in prediction measures. In this paper, we mainly explore the effects of the link temporal information in the graph stream link prediction. We design a graph stream-based framework to solve link prediction problems in dynamic networks which can provide a convenient platform to implement different link prediction methods for dynamic networks, and evaluate these methods on a fair basis. Then, we proposed the Time Decay-based Link Prediction (TDLP) method to improve the efficient of link prediction problem in the dynamic networks. TDLP extends the neighborhood-based measure with time decay functions in graph stream scenarios which can handle temporal information and massive data. Experiment results demonstrate that the accuracy of link prediction for dynamic networks can be efficiently improved in our TDLP method.

This work copes with the problem of link prediction in large-scale two-mode social networks. Two variations of the link prediction tasks are studied: predicting links in a bipartite graph and predicting links in a unimodal graph obtained by the projection of a bipartite graph over one of its node sets. For both tasks, we show in an empirical way, that taking into account the bipartite nature of the graph can enhance substantially the performances of prediction models we learn. This is achieved by introducing new variations of topological atttributes to measure the likelihood of two nodes to be connected. Our approach, for both tasks, consists in expressing the link prediction problem as a two class discrimination problem. Classical supervised machine learning approaches can then be applied in order to learn prediction models. Experimental validation of the proposed approach is carried out on two real data sets: a co-authoring network extracted from the DBLP bibliographical database and bipartite graph history of transactions on an on-line music e-commerce site.

Link prediction is an important tool for many social media sites to find the missing and future links among users. Understanding users' sentiment and their social relationships are potentially valuable. In this paper, two new sentiment similarity measures have been proposed and an algorithm has been designed to do link prediction by incorporating the structure and sentiment attribute of nodes. In order to evaluate the proposed algorithm, links and tweets with regard to some hot topics of 2014 FIFA World Cup Brazil are crawled from Tencent Weibo, and the sentiment distributions of crowds are analyzed for each topic. The experimental results show that the number of users with the same emotion and the sentiment distributions of crowds will influence a user to link with another user, so the sentiment attribute of nodes in social network can help to improve the performance of link prediction.

The computation of link prediction is one of the most important tasks on a social network. Several methods are available in the literature to predict links in networks and RSM index is one of them. The RSM index is applicable in the fuzzy environment and it does not incorporate the notion of falsity and indecency parameters which occur frequently in uncertain environments. In the present method, the behaviors of the common neighbor and the other parameters, like nature of job, location, etc., are considered. In this paper, more parameters are included in the RSM index for making it more flexible and realistic and it is best fitted in the neutrosophic environment. Many important properties are studied for this modified RSM index. A small network from Facebook is considered to illustrate the problem.

The link prediction problem is a time-evolving model in network science that has simultaneously abetted myriad applications and experienced extensive methodological improvement. Inferring the possibility of emerging links in dynamic social networks, also known as the dynamic link prediction task, is complex and challenging. In contrast to the link prediction in cross-sectional networks, dynamic link prediction methods need to cater to the actor-level temporal changes and associated evolutionary information regarding their micro- (i.e., link formation/deletion) and mesoscale (i.e., community formation) network structure. With the advent of abundant community detection algorithms, the research community has examined community-aware link prediction strategies in static networks. However, the same task in dynamic networks where, apart from the actors and links among them, their community pattern is also dynamic, is yet to be explored. Evolutionary community-aware information, including the associated link structure and temporal neighborhood changes, can effectively be mined to build dynamic similarity metrics for dynamic link prediction. This study aims to develop and integrate such dynamic features with machine learning algorithms for link prediction tasks in dynamic social networks. It also compares the performances of these features against well-known similarity metrics (i.e., ResourceAllocation) for static networks and a time series-based link prediction strategy in dynamic networks. These proposed features achieved high-performance scores, representing them as prospective candidates for both dynamic link prediction tasks and modeling the network growth.