Evolving coauthorship modeling and prediction via time-aware paired choice analysis

Coauthorship prediction is challenging yet important for academic collaboration and novel research topics discovery. The challenges lie in the dynamics of social or organizational relationships, changing preferences of suitable collaborators, and the evolution of research interests or topics. However, most current approaches and systems developed so far are mainly based on past coauthorships from a static viewpoint and do not capture the above evolving characteristics in coauthoring. Accordingly, this paper proposes a time-aware approach to capture the evolving coauthorships from online academic databases in terms of capturing the dynamics of social relationships and research interests. In particular, in order to understand the underlying factors influencing researchers to make choices of coauthors, we incorporate choice modeling based on utility theory. More specifically, our model conducts a series of pairwise choices over a poset induced by a utility function so as to learn the preference over all candidate coauthors. To complete the model inference, a gradient-based algorithm is devised to efficiently learn the model parameters for large-scale data. Finally, extensive experiments conducted on a real-world dataset show that our approach consistently outperforms other state-of-the-art methods.