Link prediction with personalized social influence

Link prediction in social networks is to infer the new links likely to be formed next or to reconstruct the links that are currently missing. Other than the pure topological network structures, social networks are often associated with rich information of social activities of users, such as tweeting, retweeting, and replying. Social theories such as social influence indicate that social activities could have potential impacts on the neighbors, and links in social media could be the results of the social influence among users. It motivates us to learn and model social influence among users to tackle the link prediction problem. However, this is a non-trivial task since it is challenging to model heterogeneous social activities. Traditional methods often define universal metrics of social influence for all users, but even for the same activity of a user, the influence towards different neighbors might not be the same. It motivates a personalized learning schema. In information theory, if a time-series signal influences another, then the uncertainty in the latter one will be reduced, given the distribution of the former one. Thus, we are motivated to learn social influence based on the timestamps of social activities. Given the timestamps of each user, we use entropy to measure the reduction of uncertainty of his/her neighbors. The learned social influence is then incorporated into a graph based link prediction model to perform joint learning. Through comprehensive experiments, we demonstrate that the proposed framework can perform better than the state-of-the-art methods on different real-world networks.