Collective Prediction of Multiple Types of Links in Heterogeneous Information Networks

Link prediction has become an important and active research topic in recent years, which is prevalent in many real-world applications. Current research on link prediction focuses on predicting one single type of links, such as friendship links in social networks, or predicting multiple types of links independently. However, many real-world networks involve more than one type of links, and different types of links are not independent, but related with complex dependencies among them. In such networks, the prediction tasks for different types of links are also correlated and the links of different types should be predicted collectively. In this paper, we study the problem of collective prediction of multiple types of links in heterogeneous information networks. To address this problem, we introduce the linkage homophily principle and design a relatedness measure, called RM, between different types of objects to compute the existence probability of a link. We also extend conventional proximity measures to heterogeneous links. Furthermore, we propose an iterative framework for heterogeneous collective link prediction, called HCLP, to predict multiple types of links collectively by exploiting diverse and complex linkage information in heterogeneous information networks. Empirical studies on real-world tasks demonstrate that the proposed collective link prediction approach can effectively boost link prediction performances in heterogeneous information networks.