ArticlesAll Issue
• Miaomiao Liu1,2,*, Jingfeng Guo3, Jing Chen3, and Yongsheng Zhang1,2

Human-centric Computing and Information Sciences volume 11, Article number: 44 (2021)
https://doi.org/10.22967/HCIS.2021.11.044

Abstract

Keywords

Introduction

With the rapid development of the Internet of Things, machine learning (ML), and artificial intelligence, many social media platforms have emerged, and large amounts of complex and heterogeneous data have been produced [1]. Characterization and prediction of such data have become a popular research topic in the field of social network analyses [2]. In real networks, entities have positive and negative relations; for example, there are friends and enemies in social fields, supports and oppositions in information fields, and promotions and inhibitions in biological fields. The type of network that uses both positive and negative links is called a signed social network or signed network [3], and it is a crucial branch of social networks. To reveal the relationships between users and the structural evolution mechanism, link prediction has been considered a fundamental research area in signed networks. Link prediction refers to the prediction of the possibility of establishing unknown links and the prediction of the missing sign type based on the observed network structure [4]. Related studies have been performed in many fields, such as trust evaluation [5], recommendation systems [6], and community detection [7]. Moreover, link prediction presents practical applications in the biological field as it can help in guiding experiments, saving time and cost, and improving accuracy. Tuan et al. [8] proposed some new similarity measures based on fuzzy and neutrosophic environments for link prediction in social networks. These measures are widely used in various domains such as the co-authorship network and protein-interaction systems.

(1) Considering factors such as the step size and the number of paths, the number and degree of first- and second-order common neighbors, the sign of links, the concept of clustering coefficient of common neighbors and sign influence (SI) based on structurally balanced rings are defined; these can effectively capture their impact on the similarity.

(2) By defining the first- and second-order similarities based on the common neighbor clustering coefficient (CNCC) and SI, respectively, a new similarity criterion of the two nodes is obtained. Then, the dual objectives of link prediction and sign prediction and top k recommended links can be realized, which can improve the prediction accuracy while ensuring efficiency.

(3) To reduce the complexity of the algorithm, the sensitivity of adjustable step-size parameters is analyzed considering the effects of paths with different step sizes on the similarity; this can further improve the prediction accuracy of the algorithm.

(4) The correctness and effectiveness of the proposed algorithm are verified for several classical signed network datasets. In addition, comparative experiments show that the method has higher prediction accuracy for both large-scale signed networks with conventional and sparse structure and small networks with special topologies.

Related Work

The link prediction algorithm based on the matrix mainly transforms signed networks into matrixes and uses a trust propagation model, matrix decomposition, or filling to complete sign prediction. Su and Song [25] proposed a low-rank matrix factorization model in which the signs of out-edges and in-edges of neighbor nodes were introduced as offset information. Shen et al. [26] proposed a framework based on projective non-negative matrix factorization that can realize negative link prediction through unsupervised learning by embedding network structures and user attributes. For drawing signed networks and performing link prediction, Kunegis [27] introduced a matrix factorization (MF) method based on the signed graph Laplacian and the concept of signed resistance distances. The method was evaluated on four signed network datasets. For link prediction in large signed networks, a matrix decomposition model based on an asynchronous distributed random gradient descent algorithm was proposed by Zhang et al. [28]. This algorithm highly reduced the size of parameter space and improved the computational efficiency. In general, the sign prediction model based on matrix processing has high computational complexity and is difficult to evaluate. Therefore, the practical application of this type of method in large networks is limited.
Given the advantages and disadvantages of the aforementioned methods, to achieve the dual objectives of link prediction and sign prediction, especially the prediction of negative links and signed networks with special topological structures, a link prediction algorithm is proposed that integrates the clustering coefficient of common neighbors and the concept of SI based on the structural balance rings to define the similarity.

Proposed Method

Theoretical Foundation
The structural balance theory provides a theoretical basis for the analysis of undirected signed networks. It starts with the analysis of the balance of triangles (Fig. 1). According to this theory, in an undirected signed network, if the sign product of all edges of a closed ring is positive, then the ring is structurally balanced; otherwise, it is unbalanced. The number of balanced ternary rings in real networks is considerably larger than that of unbalanced rings [37]. The balance index of large signed networks such as Epinions and Slashdot reaches 89.6% and 86.2%, respectively, and the proportion of balanced ternary rings increases with time [38] (Table 1). Some basic laws of the theory are widely used in studies on link prediction in signed networks [27]. Analyzing the sign attributes of the existing links with unknown or missing signs, such as sign prediction, is necessary. Generally, according to the structural balance theory, the ring where two target nodes are located can enhance the structural balance of the network to the maximum extent.

Fig. 1. Structural balance theory.

Table 1. Characteristics of the initial and final signed graph according to the KORIP model [38]
Dataset Total triangles Consistent edges |$T_0$| |$T_1$| |$T_2$| |$T_3$|
Balance Unbalanced
Initial GNP 334 8414 2526 41 119 85 103
KORIP GNP 144442865 945810 1960 226500 107963001 678228 35576025
Initial RPL 3218 24698 1947 182 1962 461 627
KORIP RPL 80559455 737350 1981 162684 59991528 492588 19912906

|$T_0$|, |$T_1$|, |$T_2$|, and |$T_3$| represent the number of triangles of types $T_0$, $T_1$, $T_2$, and $T_3$ of Fig. 1, respectively.

Classical Similarity Indicators
For the prediction of signed networks, analysing the possibility of the establishment of links that have not yet been connected, such as link prediction, is necessary. The higher the similarity between two nodes, the higher is the possibility of the establishment of links. Classical similarity indicators include common neighbor (CN), Jaccard, Adamic–Adar (AA), resource allocation (RA), local path (LP), and Katz, as shown in formulae (1)–(6). In these formulae, $S_xy$ represents the similarity between nodes $x$ and $y$, $Γ(x)$ represents the neighbor set of node $x, k(x)$ represents the degree of node $x$, and the symbol “$| |$” represents the size of the set. $α$ is the parameter for adjusting the influence of the third-order path on the similarity. $A$ is the adjacency matrix of $G$. The term $path_{xy}^{<l>}$ represents the set of paths with a step size of $l$ between nodes $x$ and $y$, and $β^l$ represents the damping factor of the path with a step size of $l$.

$S_{xy}^{CN} = |Γ(x) ∩Γ(y) |$(1)

$S_{xy}^{Jaccard} = \frac{|Γ(x) ⌒Γ(y) |}{|Γ(x) ∪Γ(y) |}$(2)

$S_{xy}^{AA} = \displaystyle\sum_{z∈Γ(x) ⌒Γ(y)}\frac{1}{logk(z)}$(3)

$S_{xy}^{RA} = \displaystyle\sum_{z∈Γ(x) ⌒Γ(y)}\frac{1}{k(z)}$(4)

$S_{xy}^{LP} = (A_2)_{xy} + a(A^3)_{xy}$(5)

$S_{xy}^{Katx} = \displaystyle\sum_{l=1}^{∞}β^l×|paths_{xy}^{<l>}|=βA_{xy}+β^2(A^2)_{xy}+β^3(A^3)_{xy}+…$(6)

Raising Problems
When considering the local topological information of a network, the classical similarity indexes, such as CN, RA, and AA, do not consider the influence of the clustering coefficient of the CNs on the similarity. As shown in Fig. 2, in terms of the node pair <$X, Y$>, the degree of the nodes $X$ and $Y$, the number of their CNs, and the degree of their CNs in Fig. 2(a) and (b) are the same, and the clustering coefficient of their CN $B$ is the same; however, the clustering coefficient of their CN $A$ is different. Thus, the concept of CNCC is introduced to comprehensively measure the contribution of characteristics of CNs to their similarity. In addition, the distribution of positive and negative links in signed networks is unbalanced [39], and negative links play a relatively more important role [11, 40]; the number of positive links is considerably larger than that of negative links. Therefore, the concept of SI is introduced to assign different weights to the sign types of multistep paths to highly accurately measure the influence of multiple paths on the sign types.

Fig. 2. Similarity definition based on the clustering coefficient: (a) Network 1 and (b) Network 2.

In this paper, we propose the CNCC-SI algorithm. To determine the influence of the local-path-information-based ternary ring on the similarity, the CNCC is introduced to comprehensively consider the contribution of the degree of the two nodes, the number of CNs, and their clustering coefficient. To determine the influence of the global-path-information-based balance ring on the similarity of nodes, the concept of SI is introduced to comprehensively evaluate the path connecting the two nodes. Considering the high computational complexity of the path information of high-order step sizes, according to a previous study [41], the path information with 2 and 3 steps is used to define the first- and second-order similarities of the node pair to achieve a better balance between prediction accuracy and calculation efficiency.

Related Definitions
This paper focuses on link prediction in undirected signed networks. An undirected signed network is usually calculated as $G=(V,E,S)$. $V={v_1,v_2,…,v_n}$ represents a node set. $E= {e(i,j)│v_i,v_j∈V,i≠j}$ denotes an edge set. $S= {sign(i,j)│v_i,v_j∈V,i≠j}$ is a sign set. If there is a positive link between two nodes, then $e(i,j)=1$ and $sign(i,j)=1$. If there is a negative link between two nodes, then $e(i,j)=1$ and $sign(i,j)=-1$. If there is no edge between two nodes, then $e(i,j)=0$ and $sign(i,j)=0$.

Definition 1 (Clustering coefficient of common neighbors). The clustering coefficient of the common neighbor v_z of the node pair <$v_x,v_y$> is introduced, denoted as $CNCC_{<x,y>}^z$, as shown in formula (7), where $T_{<x,y>}^Z$ represents the number of connected edges between neighbors of $v_z$ and $k(z)$ represents the degree of $v_z$.

$CNCC_{<x,y>}^z=\frac{2×T_{<x,y>}^z}{k(z)×[k(z)-1]}$(7)

Definition 2 (Similarity based on first-order common neighbors). To improve the prediction accuracy, the CNCC-SI algorithm considers many factors, such as the degree of the two nodes, the clustering coefficient, the degree of their first-order common neighbors, and the sign of the edge. For all $v_x,v_y∈V$ and $sign(x,y)=0$, based on the structural balance theory, the similarity between nodes based on first-order common neighbors is defined as $SCN_1$<$x,y$>, as shown in formula (8), where $N_1 (x)$ and $N_2 (x)$ represent the first- and second-order neighbor sets of node $v_x$, respectively.

$SCN_1 (x,y)=\displaystyle\sum_{|l|= 2}SimPath_{<x,y>}^l =\displaystyle\sum_{z∈N_1 (x)∩N_1 (y)}\frac{CNCC_{<x,y>}^z×sign(x,z)×sign(z,y)}{k(z)}$(8)

Definition 3 (SI based on balanced rings). In view of the unbalanced proportion of positive and negative links, the concept of SI is introduced in higher-order paths to assign a small weight to negative links and a large weight to positive links, which is recorded as $SIPath_{<x,y>}^{|l|= 3}$, as shown in formula (9), where
$l=v_x e(v_x,v_p)v_p e(v_p,v_q)v_y$ is the path connecting $v_x$ and $v_y$ with a step size of 3, and $v_p$ and $v_q$ are the two intermediate nodes on the path l, namely $v_p∈N_1 (x)∩N_2 (y)$ and $v_q∈N_1 (y)∩N_2 (x)$. Parameter $α$ represents the weight of positive links of path $l$, with the value of 1, and $β$ represents the weight of negative links of path $l$, with the value of 0.5.

$SIPath_{<x,y>}^{|l|= 3}=\begin{cases} 3α, && sign(x,p)+sign(p,q)+sign(q,y)= 3 \cr 3β, && sign(x,p)+sign(p,q)+sign(q,y)=-3 \cr 2α+β, && sign(x,p)+sign(p,q)+sign(q,y)= 1 \cr α+2β, && sign(x,p)+sign(p,q)+sign(q,y)=-1 ) \end{cases}$(9)

Definition 4 (Similarity based on second-order common neighbors): Based on the aforementioned definitions, the similarity of the two nodes based on second-order common neighbors is defined through the path information with step size = 3, which is recorded as $SCN_2$<$x,y$>, as shown in formula (10).

$SCN_2(x,y)=\displaystyle\sum_{|l|= 3}SimPath_{<x,y>}^l =\displaystyle\sum_{|l|= 3}{SIPath_{<x,y>}^{|l|= 3}×sign(x,p)×sign(p,q)×sign(q,y)}{k(p)+k(q)-1}$(10)

Definition 5 (Similarity based on common neighbors): The total similarity between the two unconnected nodes is defined as the sum of similarity scores of the two nodes based on their first- and second-order common neighbors, which is recorded as $SCN(x,y)$, as shown in Eq. (11). $|SCN(x,y)|$ represents the possibility of the node $v_x$ and $v_y$ to establish a link; the sign type of the link is the same as that of $SCN(x,y)$.

$SCN(x,y)=\displaystyle\sum_{2≤|l|≤3}SimPath_{<x,y>}^l =SCN_1 (x,y)+SCN_2 (x,y)$(11)

Algorithm Description
Algorithm 1. CNCC_SI
Input: G = (V,E,S)
Output: SCN(x,y) and sign(x,y)
Begin
2) For each vx, vy ∈ V do
3)     If e(x, y) = 0 or $e(x, y) = 1∧sign(x, y)$ = 0 then
4)       Stack.size = 3; push $x$ in Stack; sNode = $x$;
5)       While sNode != $y$ and len(Stack) < 3
6)         Find nNode = sNode.getRelationNodes();
7)         If nNode in stack : return;
8)         Else: push nNode in stack; sNode = nNode; Path.append(stack);
9)       End while
10)     Repeat the above procedures until all paths have been found
11)     For each route in Path
12)       Calculate $SCN1(x, y)$ → s1 where len(route) = 2
13)       Calculate $SCN2(x, y)$ → s2 where len(route) = 3
14)       Return s1 + s2 → $SCN(x, y)$
15)     End for
16)   End if
17)   If $SCN(x, y)> 0$, then {$sign(x, y) = 1$} Else {$sign(x, y) = −1$} End if
18)   Return $sign(x, y)$
19) End for
20) Sort $|SCN(x,y)|$ in descending order and return top $k$
END

Experiments and Analysis

Dataset
Three classical and large-scale real datasets as well as three small datasets that are commonly used in studies on signed networks are used for our experiments, as shown in Table 2. Among these, networks used in clustering reclustering algorithm (CRA) and finding and extracting community (FEC) algorithm are simulation datasets, and Gahuku–Gama sub-tribe (GGS) is the real dataset [42].

Table 2. Basic characteristics of datasets
Dataset |V| |E| Proportion of positive edges (%) Average degree Average shortest path Average clustering coefficient
Epinions 131828 840799 85 12.76 3.16 0.19
Slashdot 79120 515397 77.4 13.02 3.57 0.08
Wikipedia 138592 740106 78.7 10.78 4.01 0.07
CRA 36 74 93.2 4 3.53 0.47
FEC 28 42 71.4 3 3.16 0
GGS 16 58 50 7.25 1.54 0.54
Evaluation Metrics
AUCʹ
In our algorithm, the total similarity calculated may be positive or negative. Therefore, we adjusted the classic index of the area under the receiver operating characteristic curve (AUC) [43] to obtain a new indicator called AUCʹ, as shown in formula (12). The probability that a link is selected randomly from the test set has a considerably higher score than a link randomly selected from the non-existent link set. In our experiment, the similarity score corresponding to the randomly selected edge from the test set and the non-existent edge is calculated. Only when the two signs are the same, the scores are compared. If the absolute value of the score of the edge in the test set is larger than that of the non-existent edge, set $\overline n'=\overline n'+1$. If the two scores are equal, set $\overline n''=\overline n''+1$. If the signs of the two are different, edges are selected again. $\overline n$ is the total number of experiments in each group in 10 independent experiments, and in this paper, its value is 20,000.

$AUC'=\frac{\overline n'+0.5×\overline n''}{\overline n}$(12)

Accuracyʹ For sign prediction, TP, FP, TN, FN, Recall, Precision, Accuracy, and F1-score are the commonly used evaluation indicators [4] (Fig. 3). Sign prediction of signed networks must evaluate the comprehensive index of the prediction accuracy of positive and negative links. Relevant studies [4, 19, 26, 39] have shown that the ratio of the number of positive links to negative links in most real networks is more than 4:1, that is, the probability of positive links being selected is substantially higher than that of negative links being selected in the experiment. Therefore, we adjusted the indicators, assigning weight of 1 and 0.5 to the sign prediction results of positive and negative links, respectively. Finally, we use adjusted Accuracyʹ to comprehensively evaluate the accuracy of sign prediction, as shown in formula (13).

$Accuracy'=\frac{TP+0.5×TN}{(TP+FN)+0.5×(TN+FP)}$(13)

Fig. 3. Confusion matrix and common performance metrics.

Experimental Results and Analysis
Experimental datasets were divided using the ten-fold cross-validation method. The ratio of the training set and test set was 9:1. Further, AUC, AUCʹ, accuracy, and Accuracyʹ were used as evaluation indexes to verify the prediction accuracy of the proposed algorithm.

Link prediction results based on AUCʹ Taking AUCʹ as the evaluation index, the link prediction accuracies of the proposed and PSNBS [9] algorithms were compared. The average value of 10 independent experiments is shown in Fig. 4. For the first five datasets, PSNBS yielded the highest prediction accuracy under the condition that the step-size influence factor λ is optimal. The proposed algorithm achieved high performance, especially for the CRA network, which has an unbalanced distribution of positive and negative links. Additionally, the proposed algorithm has higher link prediction accuracy than PSNBS. For the GGS network, the accuracy of the proposed algorithm is low. The network describes the political alliances and antagonistic relationships among 16 sub-tribes. Its topology is special (Figs. 5–7). For the dataset with the same number of positive and negative links, the accuracy of the algorithm can still reach 71%, which shows its good robustness.
For the FEC network, the AUCʹ of the two algorithms is always 0.5. The topology of the dataset is also very special (Figs. 8, 9). In the FEC network, 28 nodes with a clustering coefficient of 0 are divided into two sets with the same degree distribution, represented by different colours in Fig. 8, where the solid and dotted lines represent positive and negative links, respectively. Among these, 24 nodes have a positive degree of 2 and a negative degree of 1, and the remaining four nodes have a positive degree of 3 and a negative degree of 0. When calculating AUCʹ, in most cases, the topology of the nodes corresponding to links obtained from the test set and non-existent edge are almost the same, and the probability of their difference is $C_{24}^2 \mkern18mu C_4^2/C_{28}^2 \mkern18mu C_{26}^2= 0.0135)$, that is, $\overline n'≈0$ and $\overline n''≈\overline n$. Therefore, the AUCʹ should be 0.5. Experimental results further verify the accuracy of the proposed algorithm.

Fig. 4. Link prediction results based on AUCʹ.

Fig. 5. Topology of GGS network.

Fig. 6. Degree distribution of GGS.

Fig. 7. Clustering coefficient distribution of GGS.

Fig. 8. Topology of FEC.

Fig. 9. Degree distribution of FEC.

Sign prediction results based on Accuracyʹ
Experiments were performed by considering TP, FP, TN, FN, Recall, Precision, F1-score, and Accuracy as evaluation indexes (Table 3). The algorithm exhibited good performance in large networks with conventional topology, small simulation, and real datasets with special topology. It also has high prediction accuracy for negative links, which showed its good robustness.

Table 3. Sign prediction results of CNCC_SI
Epinions Slashdot Wikipedia CRA FEC GGS
TP(+/+) 0.8215 0.6895 0.8581 0.6 0.875 0.5
FP(+/–) 0.0555 0.1071 0.0635 0.4 0.125 0.1667
TN(–/–) 0.104 0.1445 0.0635 0 0 0.3333
FN(–/+) 0.019 0.0589 0.0149 0 0 0
Recall 0.9774 0.9213 0.9829 1 1 1
Precision 0.9367 0.8655 0.9311 0.6 0.875 0.75
F1-score 0.9566 0.8926 0.9563 0.75 0.9333 0.8571
Accuracy 0.9255 0.834 0.9216 0.6 0.875 0.8333

Fig. 10. Prediction results based on Accuracyʹ.

Moreover, considering Accuracyʹ as the evaluation index, a comparison between the proposed algorithm and the PSNBS algorithm was performed. The results shown in Fig. 10 are the average value of 10 independent experiments. The sign prediction accuracy of the CNCC-SI algorithm is higher than that of the PSNBS algorithm. Particularly, in the case of the three small networks with special topological structures, the sign prediction accuracy of the proposed algorithm considerably improved, which further showed its correctness and effectiveness.

Sensitivity Analysis of Adjustable Step Size
Related studies have shown that the contribution of higher-order paths to the similarity of nodes is lower than that of lower-order paths [9, 10]. Thus, in subsequent experiments, the adjustable step parameters $ε (0.5 ≤ ε ≤1)$ and $1 − ε$ were given to the paths with step sizes of 2 and 3, respectively. The total similarity of the two nodes was modified, as shown in formula (14), which was recorded as $SCN(x,y)^ε$, and the modified algorithm was marked as $CNCC_SI^ε$.

$SCN(x,y)^ε=ε×SCN_1 (x,y)+(1-ε)×SCN_2 (x,y)$(14)

Accordingly, experiments were performed under the same conditions. The adjustable step-size parameter ε was between 0 and 1. The experimental results based on AUCʹ, Accuracyʹ, and F1-score are shown in Fig. 11. For a particular network, the changing trend of the link prediction and sign prediction with ε is consistently based on AUCʹ, Accuracyʹ, and F1-score, which verified the correctness of the proposed algorithm to some extent.

Fig. 11. Link prediction results of CNCC-SIε under different ε: (a) Epinions, (b) Slashdot, (c) Wikipedia, (d) CRA, (e) GGS, and (f) FEC.

Comparison with Other Algorithms
Comparison based on AUC
Experiments were repeated on three large datasets by considering the AUC presented in [13]. as the evaluation index. For the AUC index [13]., the numbers of positive and negative links predicted correctly were assigned weights of 1 and 0.5, respectively. The results of CN-Predict [13]., ICN-Predict [13]., PSNBS(λ) [09]., CNCC-SI, and CNCC-SIε algorithms are shown in Fig.12. The prediction accuracy of the CNCC-SIε algorithm is higher than that of the others. The similarity calculation method based on the clustering coefficient of common neighbors and the SI can effectively solve the problems associated with other algorithms, especially for networks with special topologies.
It should be noted that the theoretical basis of link prediction for signed networks is the structural balance theory and status theory, which are applicable to the undirected signed networks and directed signed networks, respectively. Although, it ignores the direction of edges, the structural balance theory is also suitable for the link prediction of directed signed networks. This paper focuses on the research of link prediction in undirected signed networks, so we ignore the direction of edges in the datasets and transform them into undirected signed networks. However, some scholars pay attention to the link prediction in directed signed networks and use the status theory for sign prediction. For example, Yang et al. 13]., PSNBS(λ) [44. proposed a deep sign prediction (DSP) method which took both the balance theory and the status theory into account, and used deep learning technology to capture the structure information of the signed networks. Besides, based on the status theory and the number of edge-dependent motifs, Liu et al. [45] proposed a sign prediction algorithm called Motif Family, which was explained by a naive Bayesian model, and achieved good prediction performance in the link prediction of directed signed networks. In order to further verify the performance of our algorithm, we use the AUC metric described earlier [44] to compare the proposed algorithm CNCC_SI and Motif Family algorithm for positive and negative link prediction. The results are shown in Fig. 13.

Fig. 12. Comparison based on AUC [13].

Fig. 13. Comparison based on AUC [45].

The experimental results showed that the AUC values of the prediction results of positive and negative links on the three large datasets of the algorithm CNCC_SI proposed in this paper could achieve satisfactory results. Except for that the AUC result of negative prediction on the Wikipedia was slightly lower than that of the Motif Family algorithm, the positive and negative prediction results of our algorithm on other datasets are much better than that of the Motif Family algorithm. However, the Motif Family algorithm achieved better performance in 16 models for negative prediction. Therefore, for sign prediction in directed signed networks, the future work will be how to combine structural balance theory and status theory effectively to achieve higher prediction accuracy.

Comparison based on Accuracy and F1
Considering Accuracy [4] as the evaluation index, we compared the proposed algorithm with classical algorithms such as MOI [15], HOC [16], CF [21], MF [27], and CTMS [9]. Besides, taking micro-F1 [44] as the metric, we compared our algorithm with the DSP and DSP_B algorithm [44]. The experimental results on large scale datasets are shown in Figs. 14 and 15.

Fig. 14. Comparison of results based on Accuracy [4].

Fig. 15. Comparison based on micro-F1 [44].

The MOI algorithm measured the imbalance of rings with step sizes <10; however, its accuracy was lower than that of other methods. The low accuracy of the CF algorithm also showed that in addition to the structural balance of the network, the local and global structures have a considerable impact on the sign prediction results. The HOC algorithm not only learned the characteristics of ternary rings but also integrated the features of quaternion and five-membered rings. However, its accuracy was worse than that of CNCC-SI, which used only the structural features of ternary and quaternion rings. The aforementioned experimental results showed that the main factor affecting the sign of edges in signed networks is the attribute characteristics of the two endpoints of the edge, followed by the local and global structure characteristics of the connected edge. This finding is consistent with the conclusion in literature [18]. Moreover, the Accuracy [4] of the proposed algorithm for Epinions and Slashdot was 93.2% and 84.3%, respectively. Although it was slightly lower than that of the SPR model (94.7% and 93.8%, respectively) described in [18], the prediction accuracy of the proposed algorithm on Wikipedia (92.9%) was considerably better than that of the SPR algorithm (86.6%). Furthermore, the Accuracy [4] does not distinguish whether the correct sample is positive or negative; thus, the prediction effect of the relevant algorithm is not good for datasets with special topologies. However, the proposed algorithm can achieve the dual goals of link and sign prediction, and it pays relatively more attention to the proportion of positive and negative links and yields high prediction performance for all signed networks. Moreover, when taking the micro-F1 as the metric, the sign prediction result of the CNCC_SI algorithm is slightly higher than that of the DSP algorithm, which shows the superiority of our method.

The top 60 links recommended using our algorithm on the three large datasets are shown in Figs. 16–18. These figures show the normalized similarity corresponding to the first three positive links and the first two negative links that are most likely to be established. The label of the node pair corresponding to the link is also marked. In addition, for the two small datasets, recommendation results and the top five links of the PSNBS and the CNCC-SI algorithm were compared in detail (Figs. 19–21); the prediction results of the two algorithms for unknown links are in strong agreement, which further verified the correctness and effectiveness of the proposed algorithm.

Fig. 16. Recommended links for Epinions.

Fig. 17. Recommended links for Slashdot.

Fig. 18. Recommended links for Wikipedia.

Fig. 19. Recommended links for GGS.

Fig. 20. Recommended links for CRA.

Fig. 21. Comparison of top five recommended links.

Conclusion

In this study, the CNCC-SI algorithm is proposed, which can simultaneously predict positive and negative links in signed networks, especially in sparse negative links. The two-step similarity based on first-order common neighbors and the three-step similarity based on second-order common neighbors are defined by combining the clustering coefficient of common neighbor nodes and signed influence. The algorithm is further improved through the sensitivity analysis of the influence factor of the adjustable step-size parameter. The experimental results on several datasets confirm the correctness, high prediction accuracy, and good robustness of the proposed algorithm in link and sign prediction. However, many challenges remain for link prediction in signed networks with complex structures, such as time-dependent networks, multilayer networks, and super-networks. Given the dynamic nature of signed networks, the uncertainty of nodes and relationships, and the data sparseness problem, effective use of the rich information of multidimensional data for fast and accurate link prediction and design of localization or parallel algorithms are the areas for future research.

Acknowledgements

Not applicable.

Author’s Contributions

Conceptualization, ML. Funding acquisition, ML, JC. Investigation and methodology, ML. Supervision, JG. Writing of the original draft, ML. Writing of the review and editing, ML, JG, JC, YZ. Formal analysis, YZ.

Funding

This work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (No. 42002138 and 62172352), Natural Science Foundation of Heilongjiang Province (No. LH2019F042), Youth Science Foundation of Northeast Petroleum University (No. 2018QNQ-01), Excellent Young and Middle-aged Innovative Team Cultivation Foundation of Northeast Petroleum University (No. KYCXTDQ202101).

Competing Interests

The authors declare that they have no competing interests.

Author Biography

Name : Miaomiao Liu
Affiliation : Northeast Petroleum University
Biography : She was born in 1982 and she is currently a full professor and the Master’s Supervisor of Northeast Petroleum University in China. Her main research interests include data mining and social network analysis.

Name : Jingfeng Guo
Affiliation : Yanshan University
Biography : He is currently a full professor and Doctoral supervisor of Yanshan University. His research interests include database theory, data mining and social network analysis.

Name : Jing Chen
Affiliation : Yanshan University
Biography : She is currently an associate professor and Master supervisor of Yanshan University in China. Her research interests include community discovery and information dissemination in social networks.

Name : Yongsheng Zhang
Affiliation : Northeast Petroleum University
Biography : He is currently an associate professor of Northeast Petroleum University in China. His research interests include wireless sensor networks and deep learning.

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Miaomiao Liu1,2,*, Jingfeng Guo3, Jing Chen3, and Yongsheng Zhang1,2, Similarity-based Common Neighbor and Sign Influence Model for Link Prediction in Signed Social Networks, Article number: 11:44 (2021) Cite this article 1 Accesses