Link prediction using node information on local paths

Link prediction is one of the most important and challenging tasks in complex network analysis, which aims to predict missing link based on existing ones in a network. This problem is of both theoretical interest and has applications in diverse scientific disciplines, including social network analysis, recommendation systems, and biological networks. In this paper we propose a novel link prediction method that aims at improving the accuracy of existing path-based methods by incorporating information about the nodes along local paths. We investigate the proposed framework empirically and conduct extensive experiments on real-world datasets obtained from diverse domains. Results show that the proposed method has achieved increased prediction accuracy when compared to existing state-of-the-art link prediction methods. (c) 2020 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.