Time Score: A New Feature for Link Prediction in Social Networks

Link prediction in social networks, such as friendship networks and coauthorship networks, has recently attracted a great deal of attention. There have been numerous attempts to address the problem of link prediction through diverse approaches. In the present paper, we focus on the temporal behavior of the link strength, particularly the relationship between the time stamps of interactions or links and the temporal behavior of link strength and how link strength affects future link evolution. Most previous studies have not sufficiently discussed either the impact of time stamps of the interactions or time stamps of the links on link evolution. The gap between the current time and the time stamps of the interactions or links is also important to link evolution. In the present paper, we introduce a new time-aware feature, referred to as time score, that captures the important aspects of time stamps of interactions and the temporality of the link strengths. We also analyze the effectiveness of time score with different parameter settings for different network data sets. The results of the analysis revealed that the time score was sensitive to different networks and different time measures. We applied time score to two social network data sets, namely, Facebook friendship network data set and a coauthorship network data set. The results revealed a significant improvement in predicting future links.