Academic Collaborator Recommendation Based on Attributed Network Embedding

Abstract Purpose Based on real-world academic data, this study aims to use network embedding technology to mining academic relationships, and investigate the effectiveness of the proposed embedding model on academic collaborator recommendation tasks. Design/methodology/approach We propose an academic collaborator recommendation model based on attributed network embedding (ACR-ANE), which can get enhanced scholar embedding and take full advantage of the topological structure of the network and multi-type scholar attributes. The non-local neighbors for scholars are defined to capture strong relationships among scholars. A deep auto-encoder is adopted to encode the academic collaboration network structure and scholar attributes into a low-dimensional representation space. Findings 1. The proposed non-local neighbors can better describe the relationships among scholars in the real world than the first-order neighbors. 2. It is important to consider the structure of the academic collaboration network and scholar attributes when recommending collaborators for scholars simultaneously. Research limitations The designed method works for static networks, without taking account of the network dynamics. Practical implications The designed model is embedded in academic collaboration network structure and scholarly attributes, which can be used to help scholars recommend potential collaborators. Originality/value Experiments on two real-world scholarly datasets, Aminer and APS, show that our proposed method performs better than other baselines.