Fast Evaluation of Link Prediction by Random Sampling of Unobserved Links

The evaluation of a link prediction algorithm requires to estimate the possibility of the existence of all unobserved links in a network. However, the number of unobserved links grows exponentially with the increase of the number of nodes, which limits link prediction in large networks. In this paper, we propose a new evaluation scheme for link prediction algorithms, i.e., link prediction with random sampling. We use this method to evaluate the performance of twelve link predictors on ten real-world networks of different contexts and scales. The results show that the performance ranking of these algorithms is not affected by randomly sampling a very small part from unobserved links for experiments, whether using AUC or the precision metric. Moreover, this sampling method can reduce the computational complexity for the evaluation of link prediction algorithms from O(n^2) to O(n) in large networks. Our findings show that the proposed scheme is a fast and effective evaluation method