Sign Prediction on Unlabeled Social Networks Using Branch and Bound Optimized Transfer Learning

Sign prediction problem aims to predict the signs of links for signed networks. Currently it has been widely used in a variety of applications. Due to the insufficiency of labeled data, transfer learning has been adopted to leverage the auxiliary data to improve the prediction of signs in target domain. Existing works suffer from two limitations. First, they cannot work if there is no target label available. Second, their generalization performance is not guaranteed due to that fact that the solution of their objective functions is not global optimal solution. To solve these problems, we propose a novel sign prediction on unlabeled social networks using branch and bound optimized transfer learning (SP_BBTL) sign prediction model. The main idea of SP_BBTL is to use target feature vectors to reconstruct source domain feature vectors based on relationship projection, which is a complicated optimal problem and is solved by proposed optimization based on branch and bound that can obtain global optimal solution. With this design, the target domain label information is not required for classifier. Finally, the experimental results on the large scale social signed networks validate the superiority of the proposed model.