Playing the role of weak clique property in link prediction: A friend recommendation model

An important fact in studying link prediction is that the structural properties of networks have significant impacts on the performance of algorithms. Therefore, how to improve the performance of link prediction with the aid of structural properties of networks is an essential problem. By analyzing many real networks, we find a typical structural property: nodes are preferentially linked to the nodes with the weak clique structure (abbreviated as PWCS to simplify descriptions). Based on this PWCS phenomenon, we propose a local friend recommendation (FR) index to facilitate link prediction. Our experiments show that the performance of FR index is better than some famous local similarity indices, such as Common Neighbor (CN) index, Adamic-Adar (AA) index and Resource Allocation (RA) index. We then explain why PWCS can give rise to the better performance of FR index in link prediction. Finally, a mixed friend recommendation index (labelled MFR) is proposed by utilizing the PWCS phenomenon, which further improves the accuracy of link prediction.