Significant edge detection in target network by exploring multiple auxiliary networks

Abstract

Despite the ability to model many real world settings as a network, one major challenge in analyzing network data is that important and reliable links between objects are usually obscured by noisy information and hence not readily discernible. In this paper, we propose to detect these important and reliable links - significant edges, from a target network by using multiple auxiliary networks and a limited amount of labelled information. In this process, we first abstract the community knowledge learnt across target and auxiliary networks to detect significant patterns. The mined community knowledge captures the key profile of network relationships and thus can be used to determine whether an existing edge indicates a true or false relationship. Experiments on real world network data show that our two staged solution - a joint matrix factorisation procedure followed by edge significance score ranking, accurately predicts significant edges in target network by jointly exploring the underlying knowledge embedded in both target and auxiliary networks.