Link mining: a new data mining challenge

A key challenge for data mining is tackling the problem of mining richly structured datasets, where the objects are linked in some way. Links among the objects may demonstrate certain patterns, which can be helpful for many data mining tasks and are usually hard to capture with traditional statistical models. Recently there has been a surge of interest in this area, fueled largely by interest in web and hypertext mining, but also by interest in mining social networks, security and law enforcement data, bibliographic citations and epidemiological records.