Whether information network supplements friendship network

Homophily is a significant mechanism for link prediction in complex network, of which principle describes that people with similar profiles or experiences tend to tie with each other. In a multi-relationship network, friendship among people has been utilized to reinforce similarity of taste for recommendation system whose basic idea is similar to homophily, yet how the taste inversely affects friendship prediction is little discussed. This paper contributes to address the issue by analyzing two benchmark data sets both including user’s behavioral information of taste and friendship based on the principle of homophily. It can be found that the creation of friendship tightly associates with personal taste. Especially, the behavioral information of taste involving with popular objects is much more effective to improve the performance of friendship prediction. However, this result seems to be contradictory to the finding in Zhang et al. (2013) that the behavior information of taste involving with popular objects is redundant in recommendation system. We thus discuss this inconformity to comprehensively understand the correlation between them. •The interaction between friendship network and information network in a multi-relation networked system is of interest to us.•An inverse investigation is presented to analyzing the effect of users’ taste on friendship creation.•The behavioral information involving with popular objects in bipartite information network improves accuracy of friendship prediction.•The different usable information in bipartite information network is respectively used in friendship prediction and recommendation system.