  In this paper we address the problem of modeling relational data, which
appear in many applications such as social network analysis, recommender
systems and bioinformatics. Previous studies either consider latent feature
based models but disregarding local structure in the network, or focus
exclusively on capturing local structure of objects based on latent blockmodels
without coupling with latent characteristics of objects. To combine the
benefits of the previous work, we propose a novel model that can simultaneously
incorporate the effect of latent features and covariates if any, as well as the
effect of latent structure that may exist in the data. To achieve this, we
model the relation graph as a function of both latent feature factors and
latent cluster memberships of objects to collectively discover globally
predictive intrinsic properties of objects and capture latent block structure
in the network to improve prediction performance. We also develop an
optimization transfer algorithm based on the generalized EM-style strategy to
learn the latent factors. We prove the efficacy of our proposed model through
the link prediction task and cluster analysis task, and extensive experiments
on the synthetic data and several real world datasets suggest that our proposed
LFBM model outperforms the other state of the art approaches in the evaluated
tasks.
