In some online social network services (SNSs), the members are allowed to label their relationships with others, and such relationships can be represented as the links with signed values (positive or negative). The networks containing such relations are named signed social networks (SSNs), and some real-world complex systems can be also modeled with SSNs. Given the information of the observed structure of an SSN, the link prediction aims to estimate the values of the unobserved links. Noticing that most of the previous approaches for link prediction are based on the members’ similarity and the supervised learning method, however, research work on the investigation of the hidden principles that drive the behaviors of social members are rarely conducted. In this paper, the deep belief network (DBN)-based approaches for link prediction are proposed. Including an unsupervised link prediction model, a feature representation method and a DBN-based link prediction method are introduced. The experiments are done on the datasets from three SNSs (social networking services) in different domains, and the results show that our methods can predict the values of the links with high performance and have a good generalization ability across these datasets.

In some online Social Network Services, users are allowed to label their relationship with others, which can be represented as links with signed values. The link prediction problem is to estimate the values of unknown links by the information from the social network. A lot of similarity based metrics and machine learning based methods are proposed. Most of these methods are based on the network topological and node states. In this paper, by considering the information from user comment and sentiment lexicon, our methods improved the performances of link prediction for both similarity based metrics and machine learning based methods.