A Survey of Link Recommendation for Social Networks: Methods, Theoretical Foundations, and Future Research Directions
35 Pages Posted: 30 Oct 2015 Last revised: 10 Nov 2015
Date Written: October 28, 2015
Abstract
Link recommendation has attracted significant attentions from both industry practitioners and academic researchers. In industry, link recommendation has become a standard and most important feature in online social networks, prominent examples of which include “People You May Know” on LinkedIn and “You May Know” on Google . In academia, link recommendation has been and remains a highly active research area. This paper surveys state-of-the-art link recommendation methods, which can be broadly categorized into learning-based methods and proximity-based methods. We further identify social and economic theories, such as social interaction theory, that underlie these methods and explain from a theoretical perspective why a link recommendation method works. Finally, we propose to extend link recommendation research in several directions that include utility-based link recommendation, diversity of link recommendation, link recommendation from incomplete data, and experimental study of link recommendation.
Keywords: Link Recommendation, Link Prediction, Social Network, Network Formation
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