A Survey of Link Prediction in Social Networks

Link prediction is an important task for analying social networks which also has applications in other domains like, information retrieval, bioinformatics and e-commerce. There exist a variety of techniques for link prediction, ranging from feature-based classification and kernel-based method to matrix factorization and probabilistic graphical models. These methods differ from each other with respect to model complexity, prediction performance, scalability, and generalization ability. In this article, we survey some representative link prediction methods by categorizing them by the type of the models. We largely consider three types of models: first, the traditional (non-Bayesian) models which extract a set of features to train a binary classification model. Second, the probabilistic approaches which model the joint-probability among the entities in a network by Bayesian graphical models. And, finally the linear algebraic approach which computes the similarity between the nodes in a network by rank-reduced similarity matrices. We discuss various existing link prediction models that fall in these broad categories and analyze their strength and weakness. We conclude the survey with a discussion on recent developments and future research direction.