Interlayer link prediction in multiplex social networks: an iterative degree penalty algorithm

Online social network (OSN) applications provide different experiences; for example, posting a short text on Twitter and sharing photographs on Instagram. Multiple OSNs constitute a multiplex network. For privacy protection and usage purposes, accounts belonging to the same user in different OSNs may have different usernames, photographs, and introductions. Interlayer link prediction in multiplex network aims at identifying whether the accounts in different OSNs belong to the same person, which can aid in tasks including cybercriminal behavior modeling and customer interest analysis. Many real-world OSNs exhibit a scale-free degree distribution; thus, neighbors with different degrees may exert different influences on the node matching degrees across different OSNs. We developed an iterative degree penalty (IDP) algorithm for interlayer link prediction in the multiplex network. First, we proposed a degree penalty principle that assigns a greater weight to a common matched neighbor with fewer connections. Second, we applied node adjacency matrix multiplication for efficiently obtaining the matching degree of all unmatched node pairs. Thereafter, we used the approved maximum value method to obtain the interlayer link prediction results from the matching degree matrix. Finally, the prediction results were inserted into the priori interlayer node pair set and the above processes were performed iteratively until all unmatched nodes in one layer were matched or all matching degrees of the unmatched node pairs were equal to 0. Experiments demonstrated that our advanced IDP algorithm significantly outperforms current network structure-based methods when the multiplex network average degree and node overlapping rate are low.