Link Prediction in Bipartite Networks
This work addresses a gap in link prediction for bipartite networks, which is useful for recommendation systems in domains like online dating and ecommerce, but it is incremental as it focuses on comparison and adaptation of existing methods.
The study tackled link prediction in bipartite networks by experimentally comparing 19 methods, including adapted unipartite techniques and a novel GCN-based approach, and found that GCN-based recommendation systems and heuristic metrics like SPM can achieve successful results.
Bipartite networks serve as highly suitable models to represent systems involving interactions between two distinct types of entities, such as online dating platforms, job search services, or ecommerce websites. These models can be leveraged to tackle a number of tasks, including link prediction among the most useful ones, especially to design recommendation systems. However, if this task has garnered much interest when conducted on unipartite (i.e. standard) networks, it is far from being the case for bipartite ones. In this study, we address this gap by performing an experimental comparison of 19 link prediction methods able to handle bipartite graphs. Some come directly from the literature, and some are adapted by us from techniques originally designed for unipartite networks. We also propose to repurpose recommendation systems based on graph convolutional networks (GCN) as a novel link prediction solution for bipartite networks. To conduct our experiments, we constitute a benchmark of 3 real-world bipartite network datasets with various topologies. Our results indicate that GCN-based personalized recommendation systems, which have received significant attention in recent years, can produce successful results for link prediction in bipartite networks. Furthermore, purely heuristic metrics that do not rely on any learning process, like the Structural Perturbation Method (SPM), can also achieve success.