Inferring Advisor-Student Relationships from Publication Networks Based on Approximate MaxConfidence Measure

A publication network contains abundant knowledge about advisor-student relationships. However, these relationship labels are not explicitly shown and need to be identified based on the hidden knowledge. The exploration of such relationships can benefit many interesting applications such as expert finding and research community analysis and has already drawn many scholars’ attention. In this paper, based on the common knowledge that a student usually coauthors his papers with his advisor, we propose an approximate MaxConfidence measure and present an advisor-student relationship identification algorithm based on the proposed measure. Based on the comparison of two authors’ publication list, we first employ the proposed measure to determine the time interval that a potential advising relationship lasts and then infer the likelihood of this potential advising relationship. Our algorithm suggests an advisor for each student based on the inference results. The experiment results show that our algorithm can infer advisor-student relationships efficiently and achieve a better accuracy than the time-constrained probabilistic factor graph (TPFG) model without any supervised information. Also, we apply some reasonable restrictions on the dataset to reduce the search space significantly.