A Novel Multilayer Model for Link Prediction in Online Social Networks Based on Reliable Paths

Link Prediction (LP) is one of the critical problems in Online Social Networks (OSNs) analysis. LP is a technique for predicting forthcoming or missing links based on current information in the OSN. Typically, modelling an OSN platform is done in a single-layer scheme. However, this is a limitation which might lead to incorrect descriptions of some real-world details. To overcome this limitation, this paper presents a multilayer model of OSN for the LP problem by analysing Twitter and Foursquare networks. LP in multilayer networks involves performing LP on a target layer benefitting from the structural information of the other layers. Here, a novel criterion is proposed, which calculates the similarity between users by forming intralayer and interlayer links in a two-layer network (i.e. Twitter and Foursquare). Particularly, LP in the Foursquare layer is done by considering the two-layer structural information. In this paper, according to the available information from the Twitter and Foursquare OSNs, a weighted graph is created and then various topological features are extracted from it. Based on the extracted features, a database with two classes of link existence and no link has been created, and therefore the problem of LP has become a two-class classification problem that can be solved by supervised learning methods. To prove the better performance of the proposed method, Katz and FriendLink indices as well as SEM-Path algorithm have been used for comparison. Evaluations results show that the proposed method can predict new links with better precision.