A Similarity Measure for Link Prediction in Social Network

A social network is a social structure made up of individuals or organizations. Social network analysis is an approach in which the network is considered as a set of nodes and relationships between them. Nodes are individuals and actually actors in the network and the relationships between them are displayed as connections between nodes. Among many social network analysis issues, link prediction has attracted much attention due to the growing number of social network users. Link prediction means predicting which new interaction is going to happen in the future. Traditional link prediction methods considered pairs of nodes as a unit and made decisions based on commonalities between them. In addition, we proposed a new similarity measure for link prediction in social networks. We compared this criterion with four prediction methods of Jaccard link, Salton Index, Salton Cosine, and resource allocation). Experimental runs in this article were carried out on five social network datasets. Our results showed that this criterion performed better than other link prediction techniques on all datasets. Social network analysis has recently attracted lots of attention among researchers due to its wide applicability in capturing social interactions. Link prediction, related to the likelihood of having a link between two nodes of the network that are not connected, is a key problem in social network analysis. Many methods have been proposed to solve the problem. Among these methods, similarity-based methods exhibit good efficiency by considering the network structure and using as a fundamental criterion the number of common neighbors between two nodes to establish structural similarity.