Predicting Scientist Collaboration by Multiple Motif Features

Scientist collaboration is of great significance for knowledge production and scientific development, and the prediction of connection and the intensity in collaboration networks are essential to understand collaboration relationships between scientists. In previous studies, most scholars only use local structure similarity to infer scientist collaboration modes, which leads to failure to accurately predict collaboration relationships between scientists. In this study, we propose a prediction method to identify missing links and link weight by using multiple motif features. The experimental results show that the highest improvement of performance in link prediction is 13.5%, and 86.8% in weight prediction. In addition, the correlation analysis on multiple motif features reveals topology correlation between different scientist collaboration modes. Our finding is helpful to predict link possibility and tie strength in scientist collaboration networks more accurately and understand deeply the evolution pattern of collaboration networks among scientists.