Enhancing link prediction by exploring community membership of nodes

With the proliferation of available network data, link prediction has become increasingly important and captured growing attention from various disciplines. To enhance the prediction accuracy by making full use of community structure information, this paper proposes a new link prediction model, namely CMS, in which different community memberships of nodes are investigated. In the opinion of CMS, different memberships can have different influence to link’s formation. To estimate the connection likelihood between two nodes, the CMS model weights the contribution of each shared neighbor according to the corresponding community membership. Three CMS-based methods are derived by introducing three forms of contribution that neighbors make. Extensive experiments on 12 networks are conducted to evaluate the performance of CMS-based methods. The results manifest that CMS-based methods are more effective and robust than baselines.