Improving Link Sign Prediction in Signed Bipartite Graphs via Balanced Line Graphs

Signed bipartite graphs are widely employed in social networks, recommender systems, and other domains, where the nodes represent two different sets, such as users and commodities, and the links have positive and negative signs to reflect the ratings. Link sign prediction is a crucial task, but the link class imbalance when one type of link (e.g., the head class) is significantly more numerous than another (e.g., the tail class) makes this task extremely challenging. To address this challenge, we propose a Line-Graph-Based Dynamic Balancing Prediction (LDBP) method. Specifically, we first convert the links of a signed bipartite graph into nodes of a line graph, and then the link class imbalance problem in the bipartite graph is naturally transformed to the problem of node class imbalance in the line graph. To tackle this problem, we introduce a Centroid Contrastive Learning (CCL) method and design a Dynamic Synthesis & Deletion (DSD) strategy for the tail-class nodes. By dynamically adjusting the quantity of synthesized tail-class nodes, we obtain a Balanced Line Graph (BaLG). Extensive experiments on real-world datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our method in improving the accuracy of link sign prediction and addressing the issue of link class imbalance.