Link prediction is a concept of network theory that intends to find a link between two separate network entities. In the present world of social media, this concept has taken root, and its application is seen through numerous social networks. A typical example is 2004, 4 February “TheFeacebook,” currently known as just Facebook. It uses this concept to recommend friends by checking their links using various algorithms. The same goes for shopping and e-commerce sites. Notwithstanding all the merits link prediction presents, they are only enjoyed by large networks. For sparse networks, there is a wide disparity between the links that are likely to form and the ones that include. A barrage of literature has been written to approach this problem; however, they mostly come from the angle of unsupervised learning (UL). While it may seem appropriate based on a dataset’s nature, it does not provide accurate information for sparse networks. Supervised learning could seem reasonable in such cases. This research is aimed at finding the most appropriate link-based link prediction methods in the context of big data based on supervised learning. There is a tone of books written on the same; nonetheless, they are core issues that are not always addressed in these studies, which are critical in understanding the concept of link prediction. This research explicitly looks at the new problems and uses the supervised approach in analyzing them to devise a full-fledge holistic link-based link prediction method. Specifically, the network issues that we will be delving into the lack of specificity in the existing techniques, observational periods, variance reduction, sampling approaches, and topological causes of imbalances. In the subsequent sections of the paper, we explain the theory prediction algorithms, precisely the flow-based process. We specifically address the problems on sparse networks that are never discussed with other prediction methods. The resolutions made by addressing the above techniques place our framework above the previous literature’s unsupervised approaches.
Link Prediction in Sparse Networks by Incidence Matrix Factorization
