Identifying Missing and Spurious Interactions in Directed Networks

Abstract

Recent years, the studies of link prediction have been overwhelmingly emphasizing on undirected networks. Compared with it, how to identify missing and spurious interactions in directed networks has received less attention and still is not well understood. In this paper, we make use of classical link prediction indices for undirected networks, adapt them to directed version which could predict both the existence and direction of an arc between two nodes, and investigate their prediction ability on six real-world directed networks. Experimental results demonstrate that those modified indices perform quite well in directed networks. Compared with bifan predictor, some of them can provide more accurate predictions.