Temporality in Link Prediction: Understanding Social Complexity

This article summarises experimental results that bring together two views in contemporary science: Bayesian analysis and link prediction, to enhance the current understanding of social network analysis (SNA), particularly in value creation through social connectedness – an important, and growing, discipline within management science.Traditional link prediction methods use the values of metrics in a graph to determine where new links are likely to arise, and little work has been done on analysing long-term graph trends. We have found that existing graph generation models are unrealistic in their prediction, and can be complemented through the use of temporal metrics, in the study of some networks. To date, no temporal information has been used in link prediction research, thereby excluding valuable temporal trends that emerge in sociogram sequences and also lowering the accuracy of the link prediction. We extracted information from the Pussokram online dating network dataset, and 9,939 cases of each class were formed. Logistic regression in the Weka data mining system was used to perform link prediction. Our results show that temporal metrics are an extremely valuable new contribution to link prediction, and should be used in future applications.In addition to using metrics to measure the local behaviours of participants in social networks, we used Bayesian networks to model the interrelationships between the metrics as local behaviours and links forming between individuals as emergent behaviours (social complexity). We also explored how the metrics evolve over time using Dynamic Bayesian Networks (DBN)