Time-aware link prediction based on strengthened projection in bipartite networks

The traditional projection models in the bipartite networks involve many node pairs that consist of weak relationships. These node pairs lead to poor quality predictions as well as high computation time. In this paper, to cope with these problems, we firstly propose a novel projection model, which is called “Strengthened Projection Model”. Then, to predict the potential links in the future, we present a new link prediction approach based on the proposed projection model. Thanks to the proposed model, the computation time is shortened, and the high probability predictions are extracted. The majority of the previous works conducted in this area have used the classical proximity measure algorithms that only take into account the current network structure, regardless of when events occur in the network evolution. To overcome these limited methods, in this paper, we also propose a novel proximity measure algorithm that considers the bipartite network evolution. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first attempt that takes into account the time-awareness in bipartite networks. To evaluate the performance of our proposed approach, we conducted experiments on the academic information network. To construct this bipartite network, we collected data from IEEE Xplore. The experimental results show that the success of the proposed method is promising.