Preferential attachment in graphs with affinities

Preferential attachment models for random graphs are successful in capturing many characteristics of real networks such as power law behavior. At the same time they lack flexibility to take vertex to vertex affinities into account, a feature that is commonly used in many link recommendation algorithms. We propose a random graph model based on both node attributes and preferential attachment. This approach overcomes the limitation of existing models on expressing vertex affinity and on reflecting properties of different subgraphs. We analytically prove that our model preserves the power law behavior in the degree distribution as expressed by natural graphs and we show that it satisfies the small world property. Experiments show that our model provides an excellent fit of many natural graph statistics and we provide an algorithm to infer the associated affinity function efficiently.