Nodes' Evolution Diversity and Link Prediction in Social Networks

Abstract

Recently, social networks have witnessed a massive surge in popularity. A key issue in social network research is network evolution analysis, which assumes that all the autonomous nodes in a social network follow uniform evolution mechanisms. However, different nodes in a social network should have different evolution mechanisms to generate different edges. This is proposed as the underlying idea to ensure the nodes’ evolution diversity in this paper. Our approach involves identifying the micro-level node evolution that generates different edges by introducing the existing link prediction methods from the perspectives of nodes. We also propose the edge generation coefficient to evaluate the extent to which an edge's generation can be explained by a link prediction method. To quantify the nodes’ evolution diversity, we define the diverse evolution distance. Furthermore, a diverse node adaption algorithm is proposed to indirectly analyze the evolution of the entire network based on the nodes’ evolution diversity. Extensive experiments on disparate real-world networks demonstrate that the introduction of the nodes’ evolution diversity is important and beneficial for analyzing the network evolution. The diverse node adaption algorithm outperforms other state-of-the-art link prediction algorithms in terms of both accuracy and universality. The greater the nodes’ evolution diversity, the more obvious its advantages.