Link prediction in social networks using hierarchical community detection

Social network analysis is an approach to the study of social structures. One of the important fields in social networks analyses is link prediction. Link prediction tries to reach an appropriate answer to this question: what kinds of interaction among members of a network would possible form in future, given a snapshot of the network in current time. The main purpose of this paper is to boost the performance of similarity based link prediction methods by using community information. This information is derived from the structure of the graph, based on the number of community levels that two vertices have in common, in a hierarchical representation of communities. To evaluate the performance of the proposed method, four datasets are used as benchmark. The results suggest that the information of communities often increases the efficiency and accuracy of link prediction.