Link prediction in directed social networks

Abstract

In today’s online social networks, it becomes essential to help newcomers as well as existing community members to find new social contacts. In scientific literature, this recommendation task is known as link prediction. Link prediction has important practical applications in social network platforms. It allows social network platform providers to recommend friends to their users. Another application is to infer missing links in partially observed networks. The shortcoming of many of the existing link prediction methods is that they mostly focus on undirected graphs only. This work closes this gap and introduces link prediction methods and metrics for directed graphs. Here, we compare well-known similarity metrics and their suitability for link prediction in directed social networks. We advance existing techniques and propose mining of subgraph patterns that are used to predict links in networks such as GitHub, GooglePlus, and Twitter. Our results show that the proposed metrics and techniques yield more accurate predictions when compared with metrics not accounting for the directed nature of the underlying networks.