Link prediction in real-world multiplex networks via layer reconstruction method

Networks are invaluable tools to study real biological, social and technological complex systems in which connected elements form a purposeful phenomenon. A higher resolution image of these systems shows that the connection types do not confine to one but to a variety of types. Multiplex networks encode this complexity with a set of nodes which are connected in different layers via different types of links. A large body of research on link prediction problem is devoted to finding missing links in single-layer (simplex) networks. In recent years, the problem of link prediction in multiplex networks has gained the attention of researchers from different scientific communities. Although most of these studies suggest that prediction performance can be enhanced by using the information contained in different layers of the network, the exact source of this enhancement remains obscure. Here, it is shown that similarity w.r.t. structural features (eigenvectors) is a major source of enhancements for link prediction task in multiplex networks using the proposed layer reconstruction method and experiments on real-world multiplex networks from different disciplines. Moreover, we characterize how low values of similarity w.r.t. structural features result in cases where improving prediction performance is substantially hard.