Abstract-Online social networking sites have become increasingly popular over the last few years. As a result, new interdisciplinary research directions have emerged in which social network analysis methods are applied to networks containing hundreds millions of users. Unfortunately, links between individuals may be missing either due to imperfect acquirement processes or because they are not yet reflected in the online network (i.e., friends in real-world did not form a virtual connection.) Existing link prediction techniques lack the scalability required for full application on a continuously growing social network.The primary bottleneck in link prediction techniques is extracting structural features required for classifying links. In this paper we propose a set of simple, easy-to-compute structural features, that can be analyzed to identify missing links. We show that by using simple structural features, a machine learning classifier can successfully identify missing links, even when applied to a hard problem of classifying links between individuals with at least one common friend. A new friends measure that we developed is shown to be a good predictor for missing links. An evaluation experiment was performed on five large Social Networks datasets: Facebook, Flickr, YouTube, Academia and TheMarker. Our methods can provide social network site operators with the capability of helping users to find known, offline contacts and to discover new friends online. They may also be used for exposing hidden links in an online social network.
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