No Arabic abstract
Networks can represent a wide range of complex systems, such as social, biological and technological systems. Link prediction is one of the most important problems in network analysis, and has attracted much research interest recently. Many link prediction methods have been proposed to solve this problem with various technics. We can note that clustering information plays an important role in solving the link prediction problem. In previous literatures, we find node clustering coefficient appears frequently in many link prediction methods. However, node clustering coefficient is limited to describe the role of a common-neighbor in different local networks, because it can not distinguish different clustering abilities of a node to different node pairs. In this paper, we shift our focus from nodes to links, and propose the concept of asymmetric link clustering (ALC) coefficient. Further, we improve three node clustering based link prediction methods via the concept of ALC. The experimental results demonstrate that ALC-based methods outperform node clustering based methods, especially achieving remarkable improvements on food web, hamster friendship and Internet networks. Besides, comparing with other methods, the performance of ALC-based methods are very stable in both globalized and personalized top-L link prediction tasks.
Many real networks that are inferred or collected from data are incomplete due to missing edges. Missing edges can be inherent to the dataset (Facebook friend links will never be complete) or the result of sampling (one may only have access to a portion of the data). The consequence is that downstream analyses that consume the network will often yield less accurate results than if the edges were complete. Community detection algorithms, in particular, often suffer when critical intra-community edges are missing. We propose a novel consensus clustering algorithm to enhance community detection on incomplete networks. Our framework utilizes existing community detection algorithms that process networks imputed by our link prediction based algorithm. The framework then merges their multiple outputs into a final consensus output. On average our method boosts performance of existing algorithms by 7% on artificial data and 17% on ego networks collected from Facebook.
Link prediction in complex network based on solely topological information is a challenging problem. In this paper, we propose a novel similarity index, which is efficient and parameter free, based on clustering ability. Here clustering ability is defined as average clustering coefficient of nodes with the same degree. The motivation of our idea is that common-neighbors are able to contribute to the likelihood of forming a link because they own some ability of clustering their neighbors together, and then clustering ability defined here is a measure for this capacity. Experimental numerical simulations on both real-world networks and modeled networks demonstrated the high accuracy and high efficiency of the new similarity index compared with three well-known common-neighbor based similarity indices: CN, AA and RA.
In social networks, by removing some target-sensitive links, privacy protection might be achieved. However, some hidden links can still be re-observed by link prediction methods on observable networks. In this paper, the conventional link prediction method named Resource Allocation Index (RA) is adopted for privacy attacks. Several defense methods are proposed, including heuristic and evolutionary approaches, to protect targeted links from RA attacks via evolutionary perturbations. This is the first time to study privacy protection on targeted links against link-prediction-based attacks. Some links are randomly selected from the network as targeted links for experimentation. The simulation results on six real-world networks demonstrate the superiority of the evolutionary perturbation approach for target defense against RA attacks. Moreover, transferring experiments show that, although the evolutionary perturbation approach is designed to against RA attacks, it is also effective against other link-prediction-based attacks.
Information entropy has been proved to be an effective tool to quantify the structural importance of complex networks. In the previous work (Xu et al, 2016 cite{xu2016}), we measure the contribution of a path in link prediction with information entropy. In this paper, we further quantify the contribution of a path with both path entropy and path weight, and propose a weighted prediction index based on the contributions of paths, namely Weighted Path Entropy (WPE), to improve the prediction accuracy in weighted networks. Empirical experiments on six weighted real-world networks show that WPE achieves higher prediction accuracy than three typical weighted indices.
State-of-the-art link prediction utilizes combinations of complex features derived from network panel data. We here show that computationally less expensive features can achieve the same performance in the common scenario in which the data is available as a sequence of interactions. Our features are based on social vector clocks, an adaptation of the vector-clock concept introduced in distributed computing to social interaction networks. In fact, our experiments suggest that by taking into account the order and spacing of interactions, social vector clocks exploit different aspects of link formation so that their combination with previous approaches yields the most accurate predictor to date.