Link prediction in online social networks using group information

Users of online social networks voluntarily participate in different user groups or communities. Researches suggest the presence of strong local community structure in these social networks, i.e., users tend to meet other people via mutual friendship. Recently, different approaches have considered communities structure information for increasing the link prediction accuracy. Nevertheless, these approaches consider that users belong to just one community. In this paper, we propose three measures for the link prediction task which take into account all different communities that users belong to. We perform experiments for both unsupervised and supervised link prediction strategies. The evaluation method considers the links imbalance problem. Results show that our proposals outperform state-of-the-art unsupervised link prediction measures and help to improve the link prediction task approached as a supervised strategy.São Paulo Research Foundation (FAPESP) (grants 2011/22749-8 and 2013/12191-5)National Council for Scientific and Technological Development (CNPq) (grant 151836/2013-2)14th International Conference on Computational Science and its Applications (ICCSA).\ud Guimarães, Portugal. 30 June - 3 July 2014