NodeSim: Node Similarity based Network Embedding for Diverse Link Prediction

TL;DR

NodeSim introduces a novel network embedding technique that captures node similarities and community structures, improving the accuracy of diverse link prediction in complex networks.

Contribution

The paper presents NodeSim, a new embedding method that incorporates community information and node similarity, enhancing link prediction performance over existing methods.

Findings

Effective in predicting both intra- and inter-community links

Outperforms state-of-the-art link prediction methods

Demonstrates robustness across various real-world networks

Abstract

In real-world complex networks, understanding the dynamics of their evolution has been of great interest to the scientific community. Predicting future links is an essential task of social network analysis as the addition or removal of the links over time leads to the network evolution. In a network, links can be categorized as intra-community links if both end nodes of the link belong to the same community, otherwise inter-community links. The existing link-prediction methods have mainly focused on achieving high accuracy for intra-community link prediction. In this work, we propose a network embedding method, called NodeSim, which captures both similarities between the nodes and the community structure while learning the low-dimensional representation of the network. The embedding is learned using the proposed NodeSim random walk, which efficiently explores the diverse neighborhood while keeping the more similar nodes closer in the context of the node. We verify the efficacy of the proposed embedding method over state-of-the-art methods using diverse link prediction. We propose a machine learning model for link prediction that considers both the nodes' embedding and their community information to predict the link between two given nodes. Extensive experimental results on several real-world networks demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed framework for both inter and intra-community link prediction.