People usually get involved in multiple social networks to enjoy new services or to fulfill their needs. Many new social networks try to attract users of other existing networks to increase the number of their users. Once a user (called source user) of a social network (called source network) joins a new social network (called target network), a new inter-network link (called anchor link) is formed between the source and target networks. In this paper, we concentrated on predicting the formation of such anchor links between heterogeneous social networks. Unlike conventional link prediction problems in which the formation of a link between two existing users within a single network is predicted, in anchor link prediction, the target user is missing and will be added to the target network once the anchor link is created. To solve this problem, we use meta-paths as a powerful tool for utilizing heterogeneous information in both the source and target networks. To this end, we propose an effective general meta-path-based approach called Connector and Recursive Meta-Paths (CRMP). By using those two different categories of meta-paths, we model different aspects of social factors that may affect a source user to join the target network, resulting in the formation of a new anchor link. Extensive experiments on real-world heterogeneous social networks demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method against the recent methods.
The concern of privacy has become an important issue for online social networks. In services such as Foursquare.com, whether a person likes an article is considered private and therefore not disclosed; only the aggregative statistics of articles (i.e., how many people like this article) is revealed. This paper tries to answer a question: can we predict the opinion holder in a heterogeneous social network without any labeled data? This question can be generalized to a link prediction with aggregative statistics problem. This paper devises a novel unsupervised framework to solve this problem, including two main components: (1) a three-layer factor graph model and three types of potential functions; (2) a ranked-margin learning and inference algorithm. Finally, we evaluate our method on four diverse prediction scenarios using four datasets: preference (Foursquare), repost (Twitter), response (Plurk), and citation (DBLP). We further exploit nine unsupervised models to solve this problem as baselines. Our approach not only wins out in all scenarios, but on the average achieves 9.90 AUC and 12.59 NDCG improvement over the best competitors. The resources are available at http: www.csie.ntu.edu.tw d97944007 aggregative  The problem of predicting links or interactions between objects in a network, is an important task in network analysis. Along this line, link prediction between co-authors in a co-author network is a frequently studied problem. In most of these studies, authors are considered in a homogeneous network, .e., only one type of objects(author type) and one type of links (co-authorship) exist in the network. However, in a real bibliographic network, there are multiple types of objects ( .g., venues, topics, papers) and multiple types of links among these objects. In this paper, we study the problem of co-author relationship prediction in the heterogeneous bibliographic network, and a new methodology called, .e., meta path-based relationship prediction model, is proposed to solve this problem. First, meta path-based topological features are systematically extracted from the network. Then, a supervised model is used to learn the best weights associated with different topological features in deciding the co-author relationships. We present experiments on a real bibliographic network, the DBLP network, which show that metapath-based heterogeneous topological features can generate more accurate prediction results as compared to homogeneous topological features. In addition, the level of significance of each topological feature can be learned from the model, which is helpful in understanding the mechanism behind the relationship building. 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.