Predicting missing links and their weights via reliable-route-based method
This work addresses the incremental problem of link and weight prediction in weighted networks for researchers in network science, offering a method to extend existing unweighted indices.
The authors tackled the problem of predicting both missing links and their weights in weighted networks, which is rarely studied, by extending unweighted similarity indices to weighted ones using a reliable-route-based method. Experiments on real networks showed that the weighted resource allocation index performed best for link existence prediction, while the reliable-route-based version improved weight prediction accuracy, with a strong correlation found between higher clustering coefficients and better prediction accuracy.
Link prediction aims to uncover missing links or predict the emergence of future relationships according to the current networks structure. Plenty of algorithms have been developed for link prediction in unweighted networks, with only a very few of them having been extended to weighted networks. Thus far, how to predict weights of links is important but rarely studied. In this Letter, we present a reliable-route-based method to extend unweighted local similarity indices to weighted indices and propose a method to predict both the link existence and link weights accordingly. Experiments on different real networks suggest that the weighted resource allocation index has the best performance to predict the existence of links, while the reliable-route-based weighted resource allocation index performs noticeably better on weight prediction. Further analysis shows a strong correlation for both link prediction and weight prediction: the larger the clustering coefficient, the higher the prediction accuracy.