Vol.:(0123456789) New Generation Computing https://doi.org/10.1007/s00354-019-00065-z 123 Temporal Link Prediction: A Survey Aswathy Divakaran 1  · Anuraj Mohan 1 Received: 17 November 2018 / Accepted: 31 July 2019 © Ohmsha, Ltd. and Springer Japan KK, part of Springer Nature 2019 Abstract The evolutionary behavior of temporal networks has gained the attention of research- ers with its ubiquitous applications in a variety of real-world scenarios. Learning evolutionary behavior of networks is directly related to link prediction problem, as the addition or removal of new links or edges over time leads to the network evolu- tion. With the rise of large-scale temporal networks such as social networks, tempo- ral link prediction has become an interesting feld of study. In this work, we provide a detailed survey of various researches carried out in the direction of temporal link prediction. We build a taxonomy of temporal link prediction methods based on vari- ous approaches used and discuss the works which come under each category. Fur- ther, we present the challenges and directions for future works. Keywords Dynamic networks · Temporal networks · Link prediction Introduction Dynamic or temporal networks [15, 38, 46] are those networks where entities and relationships appear and disappear over time. Entities are represented by nodes and relationships between them are represented by links. Each link carries information on the time when it is active, along with other possible characteristics. Almost all the real-world complex phenomena can be modeled as dynamic networks. Such net- works are evolving in nature since they change as a function of time. For instance, social networks, communication networks, biological networks, etc., have an under- lying structure of evolving networks where nodes and edges are added and removed over time. The network structure which describes how a graph is wired helps us to predict and understand the behavior of such systems. In many cases, the edges are * Aswathy Divakaran aswathydiv36@gmail.com Anuraj Mohan anurajmohan@gmail.com 1 Department of Computer Science and Engineering, NSS College of Engineering, Palakkad, India