Will We Connect Again? Machine Learning for Link Prediction in Mobile Social Networks

In this paper we examine link prediction for two types of data sets with mobility data, namely call data records (from the MIT Reality Mining project) and location-based social networking data (from the companies Gowalla and Brightkite). These data sets contain location information, which we incorporate in the features used for prediction. We also examine different strategies for data cleaning, in particular thresholding based on the amount of social interaction. We investigate the machine learning algorithms Decision Tree, Naïve Bayes, Support Vector Machine, and Logistic Regression. Generally, we find that our feature selection and filtering of the data sets have a major impact on the accuracy of link prediction, both for Reality Mining and Gowalla. Experimentally, the Decision Tree and Logistic Regression classifiers performed best.