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Link prediction

Link prediction is a graph-learning task that estimates whether a connection exists or may occur between nodes, often by scoring candidate links.

How 3 Manning books explain it

Knowledge Graphs and LLMs in Action

Link prediction is a graph-learning technique that forecasts missing, future, or otherwise unobserved connections between nodes, optionally assigning scores or probabilities to candidate links.

How it is used
Uses graph structure to forecast missing or future connections for recommendations, scientific discovery, security, and relational inference.
How deep it goes
Builds the task from graph representation through featurization, classifiers, GNN encoders, decoders, scoring, and evaluation.
Examples
Demonstrates co-authorship forecasting, drug repurposing, and MovieLens user–movie recommendation using structural features, Node2Vec, and heterogeneous GNNs.
What you can do after
Build it from scratch as a graph-learning pipeline that featurizes nodes or pairs, trains a scorer, predicts links, and evaluates results.

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Graph Algorithms for Data Science

Link prediction is a graph machine learning task that predicts prospective relationships between nodes, optionally including their relationship types.

How it is used
Predicts future or missing relationships for network analysis and recommender systems.
How deep it goes
Walks through pair-feature construction, leakage-safe splitting, negative sampling, and binary-classifier training without optimization details.
Examples
Uses friendship pairs, user–product purchases, drug–disease links, and Twitch shared audiences.
What you can do after
Apply it via Cypher, pandas, and a classifier to train and evaluate relationship predictions from graph features.

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Graph Neural Networks in Action

Link prediction, or edge prediction, is a graph-learning task that estimates whether an edge exists or should exist between graph entities.

How it is used
Predicts links between node pairs when graph relationships are missing, costly to observe, or changing.
How deep it goes
Builds a GCN-based encoder and decoder, then details edge splitting, training, and evaluation; defers the inner-product rationale.
Examples
Uses Amazon Electronics co-purchases to demonstrate edge exploration, a validation/test split, and held-out ROC AUC evaluation.
What you can do after
Apply it via PyTorch Geometric to prepare edges, train a graph autoencoder, and evaluate predicted links.

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Related concepts

These guides are generated from the text of Manning books by Manning's knowledge graph and link to the sections they draw on. The full books are available on liveBook and at manning.com.