An effective community-based link prediction model for improving accuracy in social networks

Abstract

Link prediction plays a predominant role in complex network analysis. It indicates to determine the probability of the presence of future links that depends on available information. The existing standard classical similarity indices-based link prediction models considered the neighbour nodes have a similar effect towards link probability. Nevertheless, the common neighbor nodes residing in different communities may vary in real-world networks. In this paper, a novel community information-based link prediction model has been proposed in which every neighboring node’s community information (community centrality) has been considered to predict the link between the given node pair. In the proposed model, the given social network graph can be divided into different communities and community centrality is calculated for every derived community based on degree, closeness, and betweenness basic graph centrality measures. Afterward, the new community centrality-based similarity indices have been introduced to compute the community centralities which are applied to nine existing basic similarity indices. The empirical analysis on 13 real-world social networks datasets manifests that the proposed model yields better prediction accuracy of 97% rather than existing models. Moreover, the proposed model is parallelized efficiently to work on large complex networks using Spark GraphX Big Data-based parallel Graph processing technique and it attains a lesser execution time of 250 seconds.