Local neighborhood-based approach of link prediction in networks

Network structure has been widely studied in recent decades. One particular usage of the network is to represent the relationship among nodes. Therefore, link prediction plays a crucial role in network analysis. A key issue of link prediction is to estimate the likelihood of potential links between nodes in the network. However, the complex network structure makes such estimation very challenging. In this paper, we propose a link prediction method based on nodes’ local neighborhood (LN), which constructs a local neighborhood for each node and calculates the likelihood of connection between nodes based on their neighbors. Further, we extend the LN method to solve the link prediction problems in a network with node covariates and community structure.