Link Mining and Link Discovery

Synonyms

Link analysis; Network analysis

Definition

Many domains of interest today are best described as a linked collection of interrelated objects. Datasets describing these domains may describe homogeneous networks, in which there is a single-object type and link type, or richer, heterogeneous networks, in which there may be multiple object and link types (and possibly other semantic information). Examples of homogeneous networks include social networks, such as people connected by friendship links, or the WWW, a collection of linked web pages. Examples of heterogeneous networks include those in medical domains describing patients, diseases, treatments and contacts, or bibliographic domains describing publications, authors, and venues. Link miningrefers to data mining techniques that explicitly consider these links when building predictive or descriptive models of the linked data. Commonly addressed link mining tasks include collective classification, object ranking, group...