Implicit Negative Link Prediction With a Network Topology Perspective

Sign prediction in signed social networks is a new research direction in the field of social relation mining, which reveals underlying links between users. Traditional sign prediction research focuses on the prediction of positive signs and neglects the mining of potential implicit links, and there is little research on negative sign prediction. To address these problems, we propose a two-stage model that uses implicit link detection and link sign prediction. First, we use the preference attachment closeness degree (PACD) to predict possible implicit links by adding a measure of relationship closeness to the traditional link prediction algorithm (PA). Next, we propose a negative link sign prediction (Ne-LP) method to predict relation types through multidimensional negative sign-related features, including those of nodes, user similarity, and structural balance, and merge them by a logistic regression model. Finally, we evaluate PACD and Ne-LP through extensive experiments on three real-world social network datasets, whose results demonstrate that the method can effectively mine implicit relations and accurately predict negative links.