A Community-Enhanced Graph Representation Model for Link Prediction

Abstract: Although Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have become the dominant approach for graph representation learning, their performance on link prediction tasks does not always surpass that of traditional heuristic methods such as Common Neighbors and Jaccard Coefficient. This is mainly because existing GNNs tend to focus on learning local node representations, making it difficult to effectively capture structural relationships between node pairs. Furthermore, excessive reliance on local neighborhood information can lead to over-smoothing. Prior studies have shown that introducing global structural encoding can partially alleviate this issue. To address these limitations, we propose a Community-Enhanced Link Prediction (CELP) framework that incorporates community structure to jointly model local and global graph topology. Specifically, CELP enhances the graph via community-aware, confidence-guided edge completion and pruning, while integrating multi-scale structural features to achieve more accurate link prediction. Experimental results across multiple benchmark datasets demonstrate that CELP achieves superior performance, validating the crucial role of community structure in improving link prediction accuracy.