Co-author relationship prediction in heterogeneous bibliographic networks

The problem of predicting links or interactions between objects in a network, is an important task in network analysis. Along this line, link prediction between co-authors in a co-author network is a frequently studied problem. In most of these studies, authors are considered in a homogeneous network, i.e., only one type of objects (author type) and one type of links (co-authorship) exist in the network. However, in a real bibliographic network, there are multiple types of objects (e.g., venues, topics, papers) and multiple types of links among these objects. In this paper, we study the problem of co-author relationship prediction in the heterogeneous bibliographic network, and a new methodology called PathPredict, i.e., meta path-based relationship prediction model, is proposed to solve this problem. First, meta path-based topological features are systematically extracted from the network. Then, a supervised model is used to learn the best weights associated with different topological features in deciding the co-author relationships. We present experiments on a real bibliographic network, the DBLP network, which show that meta path-based heterogeneous topological features can generate more accurate prediction results as compared to homogeneous topological features. In addition, the level of significance of each topological feature can be learned from the model, which is helpful in understanding the mechanism behind the relationship building.