Bounded link prediction for very large networks

Evaluation of link prediction methods is a hard task in very large complex networks because of the inhibitive computational cost. By setting a lower bound of the number of common neighbors (CN), we propose a new framework to efficiently and precisely evaluate the performances of CN-based similarity indices in link prediction for very large heterogeneous networks. Specifically, we propose a fast algorithm based on the parallel computing scheme to obtain all the node pairs with CN values larger than the lower bound. Furthermore, we propose a new measurement, called self-predictability, to quantify the performance of the CN-based similarity indices in link prediction, which on the other side can indicate the link predictability of a network.