Link Weight Prediction Using Weight Perturbation and Latent Factor

Link weight prediction is an important subject in network science and machine learning. Its applications to social network analysis, network modeling, and bioinformatics are ubiquitous. Although this subject has attracted considerable attention recently, the performance and interpretability of existing prediction models have not been well balanced. This article focuses on an unsupervised mixed strategy for link weight prediction. Here, the target attribute is the link weight, which represents the correlation or strength of the interaction between a pair of nodes. The input of the model is the weighted adjacency matrix without any preprocessing, as widely adopted in the existing models. Extensive observations on a large number of networks show that the new scheme is competitive to the state-of-the-art algorithms concerning both root-mean-square error and Pearson correlation coefficient metrics. Analytic and simulation results suggest that combining the weight consistency of the network and the link weight-associated latent factors of the nodes is a very effective way to solve the link weight prediction problem.