MVCWalker: Random Walk-Based Most Valuable Collaborators Recommendation Exploiting Academic Factors

In academia, scientific research achievements would be inconceivable without academic collaboration and cooperation among researchers. Previous studies have discovered that productive scholars tend to be more collaborative. However, it is often difficult and time-consuming for researchers to find the most valuable collaborators (MVCs) from a large volume of big scholarly data. In this paper, we present MVCWalker, an innovative method that stands on the shoulders of random walk with restart (RWR) for recommending collaborators to scholars. Three academic factors, i.e., coauthor order, latest collaboration time, and times of collaboration, are exploited to define link importance in academic social networks for the sake of recommendation quality. We conducted extensive experiments on DBLP data set in order to compare MVCWalker to the basic model of RWR and the common neighbor-based model friend of friends in various aspects, including, e.g., the impact of critical parameters and academic factors. Our experimental results show that incorporating the above factors into random walk model can improve the precision, recall rate, and coverage rate of academic collaboration recommendations.