Link Prediction in Bipartite Network Using Composite Similarities

Analysis of a bipartite (two-mode) network is a significant research area to understand the formation of social communities, economic systems, drug side effect topology, etc. in complex information systems. Most of the previous works talk about a projection-based model or latent feature model, which predicts the link based on singular similarity. The projection-based models suffer from the loss of structural information in the projected network and the latent feature is hardly present. This work proposes a novel method for link prediction in the bipartite network based on an ensemble of composite similarities, overcoming the issues of model-based and latent feature models. The proposed method analyzes the structure, neighborhood nodes as well as latent attributes between the nodes to predict the link in the network. To illustrate the proposed method, experiments are performed with five real-world data sets and compared with various state-of-art link prediction methods and it is inferred that this method outperforms with ~3% to ~9% higher using area under the precision-recall curve (AUC-PR) measure. This work holds great significance in the study of biological networks, e-commerce networks, complex web-based systems, networks of drug binding, enzyme protein, and other related networks in understanding the formation of such complex networks. Further, this study helps in link prediction and its usability for different purposes ranging from building intelligent systems to providing services in big data and web-based systems. Keywords: Bipartite network; ensemble; link prediction; potential link