Papers for

recommendation system developers

Papers whose findings have a practical use for this group, as judged from the abstract. Open a paper to read what it means in practice.

Spectral clustering enables exact community detection in bipartite networks

Exact Community Recovery in Bipartite Networks

Abstract: Community detection in bipartite networks is a fundamental problem in modern data analysis, with applications in recommendation systems, biological networks, and social network analysis. Unlike conventional unipartite graphs, bipartite networks consist of two distinct types of nodes with edges only connecting across types, so recovering latent communities requires estimating labels on the two node types. The stochastic co-blockmodel is a classical probabilistic framework for such networks, yet theoretical guarantees for exact community recovery in this setting remain limited, especially when the number of communities grows, the community sizes are unbalanced, or the degrees are heterogeneous. In this work, we prove that a simple spectral clustering algorithm based on the diagonal-deleted Gram matrix achieves exact recovery with high probability under mild conditions on sparsity, community balance, and the number of clusters. We further extend the result to the degree-corrected stochastic co-blockmodel, where each node carries its own degree heterogeneity parameter, and show that a row-normalized version of the same algorithm maintains the exact recovery guarantee. Extensive experiments validate our theoretical findings.

Fri 11 SeptSocial and Information Networks
The gist
Community detection means finding groups of related nodes in networks. Bipartite networks have two types of nodes connected only across types, making community detection harder. The authors show that a simple mathematical method, spectral clustering on a special matrix, can find the exact communities reliably under certain realistic conditions. They also extend this method to handle nodes with very different connection levels and confirm their theory with experiments.
Open 2609.12445v1

Link prediction improved by combining node importance and local network patterns

Link prediction in complex networks via fusing node centrality and local similarity indices

Abstract: Local similarity indices are widely used in link prediction on complex networks owing to their low computational cost; however, in sparse networks they assign a zero score to every node pair lacking common neighbors, which severely limits their predictive power. A natural remedy is to fuse node centrality indices with local similarity indices: the former provide global importance for the node pair, while the latter capture fine-grained local topology, and the two can be combined into complementary scores within a unified framework. This paper uses PageRank and DomiRank as two representative centrality measures and constructs a centrality--local-similarity fusion framework. The PageRank-based fusion proposed by Charikhi is first generalized to seven classical local similarity indices, and the universality of its improvement is systematically verified on nine real-world network datasets. Furthermore, the DomiRank centrality is introduced to build the DR-MD series of fused indices under a unified weighting coefficient, which overcomes the drawback that the PageRank-based fusion requires index-by-index weight tuning. Results of five-fold cross-validation together with Wilcoxon signed-rank tests show that, under the unified experimental protocol, all DR-MD indices consistently outperform the corresponding local baselines and their PR-MD counterparts on all nine datasets ($p=0.002$), and that the improvements remain robust against perturbations of $σ$ and the weighting coefficients within the near-critical parameter plateau; in particular, DR-RA achieves an average AUC of 0.7084, surpassing global methods such as Katz and RWR as well as several advanced similarity indices. The framework is inherently extensible, and its fusion paradigm can be straightforwardly generalized to couple other node centrality indices with local similarity indices.

Wed 9 SeptSocial and Information Networks
The gist
Predicting missing or future links in networks often uses local clues like shared neighbors, but this can fail when nodes have no neighbors in common. The authors show that combining measures of node importance, called centrality, with these local clues improves predictions. They introduce a new way to fuse these metrics using PageRank and a new centrality called DomiRank, proving this approach works better across many real-world networks. Their best combined method outperforms some established global methods, and their framework can be extended to other centrality and similarity measures.
Open 2609.09658v1