Eur. Phys. J. B (2017) 90: 157
https://doi.org/10.1140/epjb/e2017-70599-4

Regular Article

Revealing how network structure affects accuracy of link prediction

School of Mathematical Sciences, MOE-LSC and SHL-MAC, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, 800 Dongchuan Road, Shanghai 200240, P.R. China

^a e-mail: xiaodong@sjtu.edu.cn

Received: 10 October 2016
Received in final form: 17 April 2017
Published online: 28 August 2017

Abstract

Link prediction plays an important role in network reconstruction and network evolution. The network structure affects the accuracy of link prediction, which is an interesting problem. In this paper we use common neighbors and the Gini coefficient to reveal the relation between them, which can provide a good reference for the choice of a suitable link prediction algorithm according to the network structure. Moreover, the statistical analysis reveals correlation between the common neighbors index, Gini coefficient index and other indices to describe the network structure, such as Laplacian eigenvalues, clustering coefficient, degree heterogeneity, and assortativity of network. Furthermore, a new method to predict missing links is proposed. The experimental results show that the proposed algorithm yields better prediction accuracy and robustness to the network structure than existing currently used methods for a variety of real-world networks.