A Fast Parallel Approach for Neighborhood-based Link Prediction by Disregarding Large Hubs

Link prediction can help rectify inaccuracies in community detection stemming from unaccounted-for or overlooked links within networks. Many existing works use a baseline approach, which incurs unnecessary computational costs due to its high time complexity. Further, many studies focus on smaller graphs, which can lead to misleading conclusions. The report introduces two parallel approaches, called IHub and LHub, which predict links using neighborhood-based similarity measures on large graphs. LHub is a heuristic approach, which additionally disregards large hubs - based on the idea that low-degree nodes contribute significant similarity among neighbors. On a server equipped with dual 16-core Intel Xeon Gold 6226R processors, LHub is on average 563x faster than IHub, especially on web graphs and social networks, while having similar prediction accuracy. Notably, LHub achieves a link prediction rate of 38.1M edges/s and improves performance at a rate of 1.6x for every doubling of threads.