Topic recommendation for authors as a link prediction problem

Recently, link prediction studies on large-scale and complex networks have particularly become the focus of interest for researchers in various scientific fields. Many complex networks created from the real-world data contain bipartite structure by nature. Bipartite networks are a kind of complex networks that represent the interactions between the different node groups. Almost all of the previous studies on link prediction in bipartite networks focus on using the properties of projection networks to predict the relations between the node pairs. In this study, a novel similarity-based link prediction method based on strengthening weighted projection is proposed to predict the potential links between the authors and the topics in the large-scale bipartite academic information network created from the real-world data. Since information loss occurs when bipartite networks are converted to unimodal networks, it should be noted that when making a link prediction in this paper, both the bipartite network and the information on strengthening unimodal network obtained from the bipartite network are used. To evaluate the proposed method, a bipartite network was first created from a real dataset consisting of authors and their work. Then the method was tested on this network. Experimental results demonstrate that it is possible to obtain faster and more accurate link prediction results by the proposed method.