Collective Classification in Network Data

Many real-world applications produce networked data such as the worldwide web (hypertext documents connected through hyperlinks), social networks (such as people connected by friendship links), communication networks (computers connected through communication links), and biological networks (such as protein interaction networks). A recent focus in machine-learnings research has been to extend traditional machine-learning classification techniques to classify nodes in such networks. In this article, we provide a brief introduction to this area of research and how it has progressed during the past decade. We introduce four of the most widely used inference algorithms for classifying networked data and empirically compare them on both synthetic and real-world data.