Abstract
This paper addresses link prediction problem in directed networks by exploiting reciprocative nature of human relationships. It first proposes a null model to present evidence that reciprocal links influence the process of “triad formation”. Motivated by this, reciprocal links are exploited to enhance link prediction performance in three ways: (a) a reciprocity-aware link weighting technique is proposed, and existing weighted link prediction methods are applied over the resultant weighted network; (b) new link prediction methods are proposed, which exploit reciprocity; and (c) existing and proposed methods are combined toward supervised prediction to enhance the prediction performance further. All experiments are carried out on two real directed network datasets.
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Notes
Target nodes are the two nodes, whose likelihood to be connected in future is being investigated.
Let a directed link from node x to node y be represented by a ordered pair (x, y). There are three possible connection setups between x and y: \(\{(x,y)\}\), \(\{(y,x)\}\), and \(\{(x,y),(y,x)\}\). If any of the three setups exists between x and y in the directed network, x and y will be connected by a undirected link in the resultant undirected network.
It says that, given three nodes x, y and z in a network, if there exist strong links \(x-z\) and \(y-z\), then there exists at least a weak tie between x and y.
Reciprocity of a directed network is given as the ratio of the number of bidirectional links in the network and the total number of links [26].
Such as degree distribution, total number of triads, clustering coefficient etc. [25].
Last four features are included to reduce over-fitting due to very small number of variables. These features have been used by Lichtenwalter et al. [19] too.
R randomForest library is used.
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Sett, N., Devesh, Singh, S.R. et al. Exploiting reciprocity toward link prediction. Knowl Inf Syst 55, 1–13 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10115-017-1066-9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10115-017-1066-9