Impact of Centrality Measures on the Common Neighbors in Link Prediction for Multiplex Networks

Complex networks are representations of real-world systems that can be better modeled as multiplex networks, where the same nodes develop multi-type connections. One of the important concerns about these networks is link prediction, which has many applications in social networks and recommender systems. In this article, similarity-based methods such as common neighbors (CNs) are the mainstream. However, in the CN method, the contribution of each CN in the likelihood of new connections is equally taken into account. In this work, we propose a new link prediction method namely Weighted Common Neighbors (WCN), which is based on CNs and various types of Centrality measures (including degree, k-core, closeness, betweenness, Eigenvector, and PageRank) to predict the formation of new links in multiplex networks. So, in this model, each CN has a different impact on the node connection likelihood. Moreover, we investigate the impact of interlayer information on improving the performance of link prediction in the target layer. Using Area under the ROC Curve and precision as evaluation metrics, we perform a comprehensive experimental evaluation of our proposed method on seven real multiplex networks. The results validate the improved performance of our proposed method compared with existing methods, and we show that the performance of proposed methods is significantly improved while using interlayer information in multiplex networks.