A potential energy and mutual information based link prediction approach for bipartite networks

Link prediction in networks has applications in computer science, graph theory, biology, economics, etc. Link prediction is a very well studied problem. Out of all the different versions, link prediction for unipartite graphs has attracted most attention. In this work we focus on link prediction for bipartite graphs that is based on two very important concepts—potential energy and mutual information. In the three step approach; first the bipartite graph is converted into a unipartite graph with the help of a weighted projection, next the potential energy and mutual information between each node pair in the projected graph is computed. Finally, we present Potential Energy-Mutual Information based similarity metric which helps in prediction of potential links. To evaluate the performance of the proposed algorithm four similarity metrics, namely AUC, Precision, Prediction-power and Precision@K were calculated and compared with eleven baseline algorithms. The Experimental results show that the proposed method outperforms the baseline algorithms.