Evolutionary Features for Dynamic Link Prediction in Social Networks

One of the inherent characteristics of dynamic networks is the evolutionary nature of their constituents (i.e., actors and links). As a time-evolving model, the link prediction mechanism in dynamic networks can successfully capture the underlying growth mechanisms of social networks. Mining the temporal patterns of dynamic networks has led researchers to utilise dynamic information for dynamic link prediction. Despite several methodological improvements in dynamic link prediction, temporal variations of actor-level network structure and neighbourhood information have drawn little attention from the network science community. Evolutionary aspects of network positional changes and associated neighbourhoods, attributed to non-connected actor pairs, may suitably be used for predicting the possibility of their future associations. In this study, we attempted to build dynamic similarity metrics by considering temporal similarity and correlation between different actor-level evolutionary information of non-connected actor pairs. These metrics then worked as dynamic features in the supervised link prediction model, and performances were compared against static similarity metrics (e.g., AdamicAdar). Improved performance is achieved by the metrics considered in this study, representing them as prospective candidates for dynamic link prediction tasks and to help understand the underlying evolutionary mechanism.

Automated summary

One of the characteristics of dynamic networks is the evolution of their actors and links. The link prediction mechanism in dynamic networks can capture the growth mechanisms of social networks. Researchers have utilized the temporal patterns of dynamic networks for dynamic link prediction. However, little attention has been given to the temporal variations of actor-level network structure and neighborhood information. This study attempts to build dynamic similarity metrics considering the temporal similarity and correlation between different actor-level evolutionary information of non-connected actor pairs. These metrics are used as dynamic features in the link prediction model and show improved performance compared to static similarity metrics.