Link Prediction in Complex Networks Using Average Centrality-Based Similarity Score

Abstract

Link prediction plays a crucial role in identifying future connections within complex networks, facilitating the analysis of network evolution across various domains such as biological networks, social networks, recommender systems, and more. Researchers have proposed various centrality measures, such as degree, clustering coefficient, betweenness, and closeness centralities, to compute similarity scores for predicting links in these networks. These centrality measures leverage both the local and global information of nodes within the network. In this study, we present a novel approach to link prediction using similarity score by utilizing average centrality measures based on local and global centralities, namely Similarity based on Average Degree (Formula presented.), Similarity based on Average Betweenness (Formula presented.), Similarity based on Average Closeness (Formula presented.), and Similarity based on Average Clustering Coefficient (Formula presented.). Our approach involved determining centrality scores for each node, calculating the average centrality for the entire graph, and deriving similarity scores through common neighbors. We then applied centrality scores to these common neighbors and identified nodes with above average centrality. To evaluate our approach, we compared proposed measures with existing local similarity-based link prediction measures, including common neighbors, the Jaccard coefficient, Adamic–Adar, resource allocation, preferential attachment, as well as recent measures like common neighbor and the Centrality-based Parameterized Algorithm (Formula presented.), and keyword network link prediction (Formula presented.). We conducted experiments on four real-world datasets. The proposed similarity scores based on average centralities demonstrate significant improvements. We observed an average enhancement of 24% in terms of Area Under the Receiver Operating Characteristic (AUROC) compared to existing local similarity measures, and a 31% improvement over recent measures. Furthermore, we witnessed an average improvement of 49% and 51% in the Area Under Precision-Recall (AUPR) compared to existing and recent measures. Our comprehensive experiments highlight the superior performance of the proposed method.