Temporal link prediction with motifs for social networks

Link prediction has attracted considerable attention. Empiricism and the evolution mechanism based approach are the mainstream methods for link prediction. However, one drawback of such approaches is that they usually ignore the dynamic evolution mechanism of social networks, yet being dynamic is an essential characteristic of a social network that exists in every stage of the network's evolution. In this paper, we address the problem of temporal link prediction and investigate social networks from the time dimension with the purpose of dynamic evolution mechanism capturing. First, we separate a temporal network into a series of snapshots. Then, we propose a triad transition matrix prediction algorithm to learn the change of the distribution of triads among the different snapshots. The learned changes in the distribution of triads can capture the dynamic evolution of the network. With a proposed triad transition influence quantification algorithm, we propose a motifs based link prediction method for temporal link prediction. The proposed method can capture the dynamic evolution of temporal networks and is universal than existing methods. Extensive experiments on disparate real-world networks and model networks with controllable evolution demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method.