Link prediction based on heterogeneous degree penalization with extending neighbors and clustering coefficient

Link prediction, aiming to find missing links in a current network or to predict some possible new links in a future network, is a challenging problem in complex networks. Many existing link prediction algorithms perform the task by optimizing the node similarity measures, and then determining the possibility of the link between any pair of similar nodes. In this paper, we propose a novel node similarity index named heterogeneous degree penalization (HDP), which incorporates the quasi-local structure information of extending neighborhood of each pair of nodes to be predicted and the clustering coefficient of their common neighbors. For specific networks with different statistical properties, we can achieve a good performance of link prediction through adjusting the penalty weights. The experiment results show that, comparing with the other existing approaches, the proposed method can remarkably improve the accuracy of link prediction.