Diffusion Signals Reveal Hidden Connections: A Physics-Inspired Framework for Link Prediction via Personalized PageRank Signals

TL;DR

This paper introduces D-PPR, a physics-inspired framework for link prediction that models nodes as signals propagating via Personalized PageRank, effectively combining static topology with dynamic information flow.

Contribution

The work presents a novel diffusion distance-based method, D-PPR, unifying structural and dynamic network information for improved link prediction across diverse network types.

Findings

D-PPR outperforms traditional heuristics in sparse and modular networks.

The framework provides a rigorous, physics-inspired approach to understanding network connectivity.

Benchmarking shows D-PPR's competitive performance on synthetic and real-world networks.

Abstract

Link prediction in complex networks--identifying the missing or future connections--remains a cornerstone problem for understanding network evolution and function, yet existing methods struggle to balance computational efficiency with theoretical rigor across heterogeneous topologies. This work introduces a physically principled framework, Diffusion Distance with Personalized PageRank (D-PPR), which unifies static topology with dynamic information flow by modeling nodes as signal sources propagating through the network via Personalized PageRank (PPR) vectors. The method quantifies node-pair similarity through the graph Laplacian-governed diffusion distance between their topology-aware signal distributions, thereby bridging microscopic interactions with macroscopic network dynamics. Systematic benchmarking on synthetic (Barab\'asi-Albert, LFR) and seven large-scale real-world networks spanning technology, biology, and social domains demonstrates that D-PPR achieves highly competitive performance, yielding favorable results when compared to representative local and global heuristics, particularly in sparse and modular networks. These findings establish a rigorous foundation for physics-inspired link prediction by revealing that incorporating dynamical processes into structural similarity metrics enables deeper insights into network connectivity patterns, offering both methodological advances and new theoretical perspectives on the interplay between topology and dynamics.