Using community information to improve the precision of link prediction methods

Abstract

Because network data is often incomplete, researchers consider the link prediction problem, which asks which non-existent edges in an incomplete network are most likely to exist in the complete network. Classical approaches compute the 'similarity' of two nodes, and conclude that highly similar nodes are most likely to be connected in the complete network. Here, we consider several such similarity-based measures, but supplement the similarity calculations with community information. We show that for many networks, the inclusion of community information improves the accuracy of similarity-based link prediction methods.