Transfer AdaBoost SVM for Link Prediction in Newly Signed Social Networks using Explicit and PNR Features

In signed social network, the user-generated content and interactions have overtaken the web. Questions of whom and what to trust has become increasingly important. We must have methods which predict the signs of links in the social network to solve this problem. We study signed social networks with positive links (friendship, fan, like, etc) and negative links (opposition, anti-fan, dislike, etc). Specifically, we focus how to effectively predict positive and negative links in newly signed social networks. With SVM model, the small amount of edge sign information in newly signed network is not adequate to train a good classifier. In this paper, we introduce an effective solution to this problem. We present a novel transfer learning framework is called Transfer AdaBoost with SVM (TAS) which extends boosting-based learning algorithms and incorporates properly designed RBFSVM (SVM with the RBF kernel) component classifiers. With our framework, we use explicit topological features and Positive Negative Ratio (PNR) features which are based on decision-making theory. Experimental results on three networks (Epinions, Slashdot and Wiki) demonstrate our method that can improve the prediction accuracy by 40% over baseline methods. Additionally, our method has faster performance time. (C) 2015 The Authors. Published by Elsevier B.V.