Qian-Ming Zhang

Jing Zhao, Lili Miao, Haiyang Fang et al.

Link prediction aims to uncover missing links or predict the emergence of future relationships according to the current networks structure. Plenty of algorithms have been developed for link prediction in unweighted networks, with only a very few of them having been extended to weighted networks. Thus far, how to predict weights of links is important but rarely studied. In this Letter, we present a reliable-route-based method to extend unweighted local similarity indices to weighted indices and propose a method to predict both the link existence and link weights accordingly. Experiments on different real networks suggest that the weighted resource allocation index has the best performance to predict the existence of links, while the reliable-route-based weighted resource allocation index performs noticeably better on weight prediction. Further analysis shows a strong correlation for both link prediction and weight prediction: the larger the clustering coefficient, the higher the prediction accuracy.

Qian-Ming Zhang, An Zeng, Ming-Sheng Shang

Information overload is a serious problem in modern society and many solutions such as recommender system have been proposed to filter out irrelevant information. In the literature, researchers mainly dedicated to improve the recommendation performance (accuracy and diversity) of the algorithms while overlooked the influence of topology of the online user-object bipartite networks. In this paper, we find that some information provided by the bipartite networks is not only redundant but also misleading. With such "less can be more" feature, we design some algorithms to improve the recommendation performance by eliminating some links from the original networks. Moreover, we propose a hybrid method combining the time-aware and topology-aware link removal algorithms to extract the backbone which contains the essential information for the recommender systems. From the practical point of view, our method can improve the performance and reduce the computational time of the recommendation system, thus improve both of their effectiveness and efficiency.

Qian-Ming Zhang, Linyuan Lü, Wen-Qiang Wang et al.

Uncovering factors underlying the network formation is a long-standing challenge for data mining and network analysis. In particular, the microscopic organizing principles of directed networks are less understood than those of undirected networks. This article proposes a hypothesis named potential theory, which assumes that every directed link corresponds to a decrease of a unit potential and subgraphs with definable potential values for all nodes are preferred. Combining the potential theory with the clustering and homophily mechanisms, it is deduced that the Bi-fan structure consisting of 4 nodes and 4 directed links is the most favored local structure in directed networks. Our hypothesis receives strongly positive supports from extensive experiments on 15 directed networks drawn from disparate fields, as indicated by the most accurate and robust performance of Bi-fan predictor within the link prediction framework. In summary, our main contribution is twofold: (i) We propose a new mechanism for the local organization of directed networks; (ii) We design the corresponding link prediction algorithm, which can not only testify our hypothesis, but also find out direct applications in missing link prediction and friendship recommendation.