Hyperlinks are an essential feature of the World Wide Web. They are especially important for online encyclopedias such as Wikipedia: an article can often only be understood in the context of related articles, and hyperlinks make it easy to explore this context. But important links are often missing, and several methods have been proposed to alleviate this problem by learning a linking model based on the structure of the existing links. Here we propose a novel approach to identifying missing links in Wikipedia. We build on the fact that the ultimate purpose of Wikipedia links is to aid navigation. Rather than merely suggesting new links that are in tune with the structure of existing links, our method finds missing links that would immediately enhance Wikipedia's navigability. We leverage data sets of navigation paths collected through a Wikipedia-based human-computation game in which users must find a short path from a start to a target article by only clicking links encountered along the way. We harness human navigational traces to identify a set of candidates for missing links and then rank these candidates. Experiments show that our procedure identifies missing links of high quality.
@cite_18: Networks have recently emerged as a powerful tool to describe and quantify many complex systems, with applications in engineering, communications, ecology, biochemistry and genetics. A general technique to divide network vertices in groups and sub-groups is reported. Revealing such underlying hierarchies in turn allows the predicting of missing links from partial data with higher accuracy than previous methods.
@cite_26: This paper introduces LDA-G, a scalable Bayesian approach to finding latent group structures in large real-world graph data. Existing Bayesian approaches for group discovery (such as Infinite Relational Models) have only been applied to small graphs with a couple of hundred nodes. LDA-G (short for Latent Dirichlet Allocation for Graphs) utilizes a well-known topic modeling algorithm to find latent group structure. Specifically, we modify Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) to operate on graph data instead of text corpora. Our modifications reflect the differences between real-world graph data and text corpora (e.g., a node's neighbor count vs. a document's word count). In our empirical study, we apply LDA-G to several large graphs (with thousands of nodes) from PubMed (a scientific publication repository). We compare LDA-G's quantitative performance on link prediction with two existing approaches: one Bayesian (namely, Infinite Relational Model) and one non-Bayesian (namely, Cross-association). On average, LDA-G outperforms IRM by 15 and Cross-association by 25 (in terms of area under the ROC curve). Furthermore, we demonstrate that LDA-G can discover useful qualitative information.
@cite_7: This paper examines important factors for link prediction in networks and provides a general, high-performance framework for the prediction task. Link prediction in sparse networks presents a significant challenge due to the inherent disproportion of links that can form to links that do form. Previous research has typically approached this as an unsupervised problem. While this is not the first work to explore supervised learning, many factors significant in influencing and guiding classification remain unexplored. In this paper, we consider these factors by first motivating the use of a supervised framework through a careful investigation of issues such as network observational period, generality of existing methods, variance reduction, topological causes and degrees of imbalance, and sampling approaches. We also present an effective flow-based predicting algorithm, offer formal bounds on imbalance in sparse network link prediction, and employ an evaluation method appropriate for the observed imbalance. Our careful consideration of the above issues ultimately leads to a completely general framework that outperforms unsupervised link prediction methods by more than 30 AUC.
@cite_36: Network structures, such as social networks, web graphs and networks from systems biology, play important roles in many areas of science and our everyday lives. In order to study the networks one needs to first collect reliable large scale network data. While the social and information networks have become ubiquitous, the challenge of collecting complete network data still persists. Many times the collected network data is incomplete with nodes and edges missing. Commonly, only a part of the network can be observed and we would like to infer the unobserved part of the network. We address this issue by studying the Network Completion Problem: Given a network with missing nodes and edges, can we complete the missing part? We cast the problem in the Expectation Maximization (EM) framework where we use the observed part of the network to fit a model of network structure, and then we estimate the missing part of the network using the model, re-estimate the parameters and so on. We combine the EM with the Kronecker graphs model and design a scalable Metropolized Gibbs sampling approach that allows for the estimation of the model parameters as well as the inference about missing nodes and edges of the network. Experiments on synthetic and several real-world networks show that our approach can effectively recover the network even when about half of the nodes in the network are missing. Our algorithm outperforms not only classical link-prediction approaches but also the state of the art Stochastic block modeling approach. Furthermore, our algorithm easily scales to networks with tens of thousands of nodes.
@cite_9: Link prediction is a complex, inherently relational, task. Be it in the domain of scientific citations, social networks or hypertext links, the underlying data are extremely noisy and the characteristics useful for prediction are not readily available in a “flat” file format, but rather involve complex relationships among objects. In this paper, we propose the application of our methodology for Statistical Relational Learning to building link prediction models. We propose an integrated approach to building regression models from data stored in relational databases in which potential predictors are generated by structured search of the space of queries to the database, and then tested for inclusion in a logistic regression. We present experimental results for the task of predicting citations made in scientific literature using relational data taken from CiteSeer. This data includes the citation graph, authorship and publication venues of papers, as well as their word content.
@cite_6: Predicting the occurrence of links is a fundamental problem in networks. In the link prediction problem we are given a snapshot of a network and would like to infer which interactions among existing members are likely to occur in the near future or which existing interactions are we missing. Although this problem has been extensively studied, the challenge of how to effectively combine the information from the network structure with rich node and edge attribute data remains largely open. We develop an algorithm based on Supervised Random Walks that naturally combines the information from the network structure with node and edge level attributes. We achieve this by using these attributes to guide a random walk on the graph. We formulate a supervised learning task where the goal is to learn a function that assigns strengths to edges in the network such that a random walker is more likely to visit the nodes to which new links will be created in the future. We develop an efficient training algorithm to directly learn the edge strength estimation function. Our experiments on the Facebook social graph and large collaboration networks show that our approach outperforms state-of-the-art unsupervised approaches as well as approaches that are based on feature extraction.
@cite_23: Abstract The Internet has become a rich and large repository of information about us as individuals. Anything from the links and text on a user’s homepage to the mailing lists the user subscribes to are reflections of social interactions a user has in the real world. In this paper we devise techniques and tools to mine this information in order to extract social networks and the exogenous factors underlying the networks’ structure. In an analysis of two data sets, from Stanford University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), we show that some factors are better indicators of social connections than others, and that these indicators vary between user populations. Our techniques provide potential applications in automatically inferring real world connections and discovering, labeling, and characterizing communities.
@cite_2: Given a snapshot of a social network, can we infer which new interactions among its members are likely to occur in the near future? We formalize this question as the link-prediction problem, and we develop approaches to link prediction based on measures for analyzing the “proximity” of nodes in a network. Experiments on large coauthorship networks suggest that information about future interactions can be extracted from network topology alone, and that fairly subtle measures for detecting node proximity can outperform more direct measures. © 2007 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.
@cite_16: Many real-world domains are relational in nature, consisting of a set of objects related to each other in complex ways. This paper focuses on predicting the existence and the type of links between entities in such domains. We apply the relational Markov network framework of to define a joint probabilistic model over the entire link graph — entity attributes and links. The application of the RMN algorithm to this task requires the definition of probabilistic patterns over subgraph structures. We apply this method to two new relational datasets, one involving university webpages, and the other a social network. We show that the collective classification approach of RMNs, and the introduction of subgraph patterns over link labels, provide significant improvements in accuracy over flat classification, which attempts to predict each link in isolation.
Link prediction The link prediction problem in networks comes in many flavors and variants. Unsupervised methods for link prediction in social networks were extensively evaluated by Liben Nowell and Kleinberg @cite_2 , who found the Adamic--Adar measure @cite_23 to perform best. More recently approaches based on network community detection @cite_18 @cite_26 @cite_36 and random walks @cite_6 were considered for predicting missing links. Supervised link prediction @cite_7 was also studied by the relational learning community @cite_9 @cite_16 , but scalability remains a challenge with these approaches.