OWA operator based link prediction ensemble for social network

•This paper firstly studied the link prediction ensemble for local information based algorithms.•The integration of individual algorithms is finished via OWA operator.•Experimental results reveal the better performances of our proposed link prediction ensemble algorithm.

The objective of link prediction for social network is to estimate the likelihood that a link exists between two nodes. Although there are many local information-based algorithms which have been proposed to handle this essential problem in the social network analysis, the empirical observations show that the stability of local information-based algorithm is usually very low, i.e., the variabilities of local information-based algorithms are high. Thus, motivated by obtaining a stable link predictor with low variance, this paper proposes a kind of ordered weighted averaging (OWA) operator based link prediction ensemble algorithm (LPEOWA) for social network by assigning the aggregation weights for nine local information-based link prediction algorithms with three different OWA operators. The finally experimental results on benchmark social network datasets show that LPEOWA obtains a more stable prediction performance and considerably improves the prediction accuracy which is measured by the area under the receiver operating characteristic curve (AUC) in comparison with nine individual prediction algorithms.