Inferring Anchor Links Based on Social Network Structure

Nowadays, people usually participate in multiple social networks simultaneously, e.g., Facebook and Twitter. Formally, the correspondences of the accounts that belong to the same user are defined as anchor links, and the networks aligned by anchor links can be denoted as aligned networks. In this paper, we study the problem of anchor link prediction (ALP) across a pair of aligned networks based on social network structure. First, three similarity metrics (CPS, CCS, and CPS⁺) are proposed. Different from the previous works, we focus on the theoretical guarantees of our metrics. We prove mathematically that the node pair with the maximum CPS or CPS⁺ should be an anchor link with high probability and a correctly predicted anchor link must have a high value of CCS. Second, using the CPS⁺ and CCS, we present a two-stage iterative algorithm CPCC to solve the problem of the ALP. More specifically, we present an early termination strategy to make a tradeoff between precision and recall. At last, a series of experiments are conducted on both synthetic and real-world social networks to demonstrate the effectiveness of the CPCC.