With the rapid development of Internet and information technology, networks have become an important media of information diffusion in the global. In view of the increasing scale of network data, how to ensure the completeness and accuracy of the obtainable links from networks has been an urgent problem that needs to be solved. Different from most traditional link prediction methods only focus on the missing links, a novel link prediction approach is proposed in this paper to handle both the missing links and the spurious links in networks. At first, we define the attractive force for any pair of nodes to denote the strength of the relation between them. Then, all the nodes can be divided into some communities according to their degrees and the attractive force on them. Next, we define the connection probability for each pair of unconnected nodes to measure the possibility if they are connected, the missing links can be predicted by calculating and comparing the connection probabilities of all the pairs of unconnected nodes. Moreover, we define the break probability for each pair of connected nodes to measure the possibility if they are broken, the spurious links can also be detected by calculating and comparing the break probabilities of all the pairs of connected nodes. To verify the validity of the proposed approach, we conduct experiments on some real-world networks. The results show the proposed approach can achieve higher prediction accuracy and more stable performance compared with some existing methods.
Keywords: Missing link prediction; attractive force; community; social networks; spurious link detection.