A Time Aware Method for Predicting Dull Nodes and Links in Evolving Networks for Data Cleaning

Existing studies on evolution of social network largely focus on addition of new nodes and links in the network. However, as network evolves, existing relationships degrade and break down, and some nodes go to hibernation or decide not to participate in any kind of activities in the network where it belongs. Such nodes and links, which we refer as "dull", may affect analysis and prediction tasks in networks. This paper formally defines the problem of predicting dull nodes and links at an early stage, and proposes a novel time aware method to solve it. Pruning of such nodes and links is framed as "network data cleaning" task. As the definitions of dull node and link are non-trivial and subjective, a novel scheme to label such nodes and links is also proposed here. Experimental results on two real network datasets demonstrate that the proposed method accurately predicts potential dull nodes and links. This paper further experimentally validates the need for data cleaning by investigating its effect on the well-known "link prediction" problem.