  Online social networks have gained great success in recent years and many of
them involve multiple kinds of nodes and complex relationships. Among these
relationships, social links among users are of great importance. Many existing
link prediction methods focus on predicting social links that will appear in
the future among all users based upon a snapshot of the social network. In
real-world social networks, many new users are joining in the service every
day. Predicting links for new users are more important. Different from
conventional link prediction problems, link prediction for new users are more
challenging due to the following reasons: (1) differences in information
distributions between new users and the existing active users (i.e., old
users); (2) lack of information from the new users in the network. We propose a
link prediction method called SCAN-PS (Supervised Cross Aligned Networks link
prediction with Personalized Sampling), to solve the link prediction problem
for new users with information transferred from both the existing active users
in the target network and other source networks through aligned accounts. We
proposed a within-target-network personalized sampling method to process the
existing active users' information in order to accommodate the differences in
information distributions before the intra-network knowledge transfer. SCAN-PS
can also exploit information in other source networks, where the user accounts
are aligned with the target network. In this way, SCAN-PS could solve the cold
start problem when information of these new users is total absent in the target
network.

Social and Information Networks;Machine Learning;Physics and Society