A potential information capacity index for link prediction of complex networks based on the Cannikin Law

Abstract

Recently, a number of similarity-based methods have been proposed for link prediction of complex networks. Among these indices, the resource-allocation-based prediction methods perform very well considering the amount of resources in the information transmission process between nodes. However, they ignore the information channels and their information capacity in information transmission process between two endpoints. Motivated by the Cannikin Law, the definition of information capacity is proposed to quantify the information transmission capability between any two nodes. Then, based on the information capacity, a potential information capacity (PIC) index is proposed for link prediction. Empirical study on 15 datasets has shown that the PIC index we proposed can achieve a good performance, compared with eight mainstream baselines.