An efficient method for link prediction in weighted multiplex networks.

Abstract

Background: A great variety of artificial and natural systems can be abstracted into a set of entities interacting with each other. Such abstractions can very well represent the underlying dynamics of the system when modeled as the network of vertices coupled by edges. Prediction of dynamics in these structures based on topological attribute or dependency relations is an important task. Link Prediction in such complex networks is regarded useful in almost all types of networks as it can be used to extract missing information, identify spurious interactions, and evaluate network evolving mechanisms. Various similarity and likelihood-based indices have been employed to infer different topological and relation-based information to form a link prediction algorithm. These algorithms, however, are too specific to the domain and do not encapsulate the generic nature of the real-world information. In most natural and engineered systems, the entities are linked with multiple types of associations and relations which play a factor in the dynamics of the network. It forms multiple subsystems or multiple layers of networked information. These networks are regarded as Multiplex Networks.

Methods: This work presents an approach for link prediction in Multiplex networks where the associations are learned from the multiple layers of networks for link prediction purposes. Most of the real-world networks are represented as weighted networks. Weight prediction coupled with Link Prediction can be of great use. Link scores are received using various similarity measures and used to predict weights. This work further proposes and testifies a strategy for weight prediction.

Results and conclusions: This work successfully proposes an algorithm for Weight Prediction using Link similarity measures on multiplex networks. The predicted weights show very less deviation from their actual weights. In comparison to other indices, the proposed method has a far low error rate and outperforms them concerning the metric performance NRMSE.