Integrating local information-based link prediction algorithms with OWA operator

The objective of link prediction for social network is to estimate the likelihood that a link exists between two nodes x and y. There are some well-known local information-based link prediction algorithms (LILPAs) which have been proposed to handle this essential and crucial problem in the social network analysis. However, they can not adequately consider the so-called local information: The degrees of x and y, the number of common neighbors of nodes x and y, and the degrees of common neighbors of x and y. In other words, not any LILPA takes into account all the local information simultaneously. This limits the performances of LILPAs to a certain degree and leads to the high variability of LILPAs. Thus, in order to make full use of all the local information and obtain a LILPA with highly-predicted capability, an ordered weighted averaging (OWA) operator based link prediction ensemble algorithm (LPEOWA) is proposed by integrating nine different LILPAs with aggregation weights which are determined with maximum entropy method. The final experimental results on benchmark social network datasets show that LPEOWA can obtain higher prediction accuracies which is measured by the area under the receiver operating characteristic curve (AUC) in comparison with nine individual LILPAs.