Link prediction based on spectral analysis

PLoS One. 2024 Jan 2;19(1):e0287385. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0287385. eCollection 2024.

Abstract

Link prediction in complex network is an important issue in network science. Recently, various structure-based similarity methods have been proposed. Most of algorithms are used to analyze the topology of the network, and to judge whether there is any connection between nodes by calculating the similarity of two nodes. However, it is necessary to get the extra attribute information of the node in advance, which is very difficult. Compared to the difficulty in obtaining the attribute information of the node itself, the topology of the network is easy to obtain, and the structure of the network is an inherent attribute of the network and is more reliable. The proposed method measures kinds of similarity between nodes based on non-trivial eigenvectors of Laplacian Matrix of the network, such as Euclidean distance, Manhattan distance and Angular distance. Then the classical machine learning algorithm can be used for classification prediction (two classification in this case), so as to achieve the purpose of link prediction. Based on this process, a spectral analysis-based link prediction algorithm is proposed, and named it LPbSA (Link Prediction based on Spectral Analysis). The experimental results on seven real-world networks demonstrated that LPbSA has better performance on Accuracy, Precision, Receiver Operating Curve(ROC), area under the ROC curve(AUC), Precision and Recall curve(PR curve) and balanced F Score(F-score curve) evaluation metrics than other ten classic methods.

MeSH terms

  • Algorithms*
  • Machine Learning*
  • ROC Curve

Grants and funding

The authors received no specific funding for this work.