Link Prediction via Convex Nonnegative Matrix Factorization on Multiscale Blocks

Low rank matrices approximations have been used in link prediction for networks, which are usually global optimal methods and lack of using the local information. The block structure is a significant local feature of matrices: entities in the same block have similar values, which implies that links are more likely to be found within dense blocks. We use this insight to give a probabilistic latent variable model for finding missing links by convex nonnegative matrix factorization with block detection. The experiments show that this method gives better prediction accuracy than original method alone. Different from the original low rank matrices approximations methods for link prediction, the sparseness of solutions is in accord with the sparse property for most real complex networks. Scaling to massive size network, we use the block information mapping matrices onto distributed architectures and give a divide-and-conquer prediction method. The experiments show that it gives better results than common neighbors method when the networks have a large number of missing links

Link Prediction in Complex Networks: A Survey

Link prediction in complex networks has attracted increasing attention from both physical and computer science communities. The algorithms can be used to extract missing information, identify spurious interactions, evaluate network evolving mechanisms, and so on. This article summaries recent progress about link prediction algorithms, emphasizing on the contributions from physical perspectives and approaches, such as the random-walk-based methods and the maximum likelihood methods. We also introduce three typical applications: reconstruction of networks, evaluation of network evolving mechanism and classification of partially labelled networks. Finally, we introduce some applications and outline future challenges of link prediction algorithms.Comment: 44 pages, 5 figure

Probabilistic Approach to Structural Change Prediction in Evolving Social Networks

We propose a predictive model of structural changes in elementary subgraphs of social network based on Mixture of Markov Chains. The model is trained and verified on a dataset from a large corporate social network analyzed in short, one day-long time windows, and reveals distinctive patterns of evolution of connections on the level of local network topology. We argue that the network investigated in such short timescales is highly dynamic and therefore immune to classic methods of link prediction and structural analysis, and show that in the case of complex networks, the dynamic subgraph mining may lead to better prediction accuracy. The experiments were carried out on the logs from the Wroclaw University of Technology mail server

Transforming Graph Representations for Statistical Relational Learning

Relational data representations have become an increasingly important topic due to the recent proliferation of network datasets (e.g., social, biological, information networks) and a corresponding increase in the application of statistical relational learning (SRL) algorithms to these domains. In this article, we examine a range of representation issues for graph-based relational data. Since the choice of relational data representation for the nodes, links, and features can dramatically affect the capabilities of SRL algorithms, we survey approaches and opportunities for relational representation transformation designed to improve the performance of these algorithms. This leads us to introduce an intuitive taxonomy for data representation transformations in relational domains that incorporates link transformation and node transformation as symmetric representation tasks. In particular, the transformation tasks for both nodes and links include (i) predicting their existence, (ii) predicting their label or type, (iii) estimating their weight or importance, and (iv) systematically constructing their relevant features. We motivate our taxonomy through detailed examples and use it to survey and compare competing approaches for each of these tasks. We also discuss general conditions for transforming links, nodes, and features. Finally, we highlight challenges that remain to be addressed

Evaluating Overfit and Underfit in Models of Network Community Structure

A common data mining task on networks is community detection, which seeks an unsupervised decomposition of a network into structural groups based on statistical regularities in the network's connectivity. Although many methods exist, the No Free Lunch theorem for community detection implies that each makes some kind of tradeoff, and no algorithm can be optimal on all inputs. Thus, different algorithms will over or underfit on different inputs, finding more, fewer, or just different communities than is optimal, and evaluation methods that use a metadata partition as a ground truth will produce misleading conclusions about general accuracy. Here, we present a broad evaluation of over and underfitting in community detection, comparing the behavior of 16 state-of-the-art community detection algorithms on a novel and structurally diverse corpus of 406 real-world networks. We find that (i) algorithms vary widely both in the number of communities they find and in their corresponding composition, given the same input, (ii) algorithms can be clustered into distinct high-level groups based on similarities of their outputs on real-world networks, and (iii) these differences induce wide variation in accuracy on link prediction and link description tasks. We introduce a new diagnostic for evaluating overfitting and underfitting in practice, and use it to roughly divide community detection methods into general and specialized learning algorithms. Across methods and inputs, Bayesian techniques based on the stochastic block model and a minimum description length approach to regularization represent the best general learning approach, but can be outperformed under specific circumstances. These results introduce both a theoretically principled approach to evaluate over and underfitting in models of network community structure and a realistic benchmark by which new methods may be evaluated and compared.Comment: 22 pages, 13 figures, 3 table