Inductive link prediction boosts data availability and enables cross-community link prediction in ecological networks

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Authors

Barry Biton, Rami Puzis, Shai Pilosof 

Abstract

Predicting species interactions within ecological networks is vital for understanding ecosystem functioning and the response of communities to changing environments. Traditional link prediction models often fall short due to sparse and incomplete data and are limited to single networks. Here, we present a novel approach using inductive link prediction (ILP), which leverages structural similarities across diverse ecological networks. Our model pools data across communities, and uses transfer learning to enable prediction within and between different ecological communities. We applied our model to 538 networks across four community types: plant-seed disperser, plant-pollinator, host-parasite, and plant-herbivore. ILP outperforms non-ILP models, particularly in host-parasite and plant-seed disperser networks. However, the efficacy of cross-community predictions varies, with plant-pollinator networks consistently under-performing as train and test sets. Moreover, we developed the first method to computationally estimate the limits of link prediction given a certain proportion of missing links, in which ILP performs better than a non-ILP model. This study underscores the potential of ILP to generalize link prediction across different ecological contexts.

DOI

https://doi.org/10.32942/X2JS75

Subjects

Ecology and Evolutionary Biology

Keywords

link prediction, machine learning, transfer learning, ecological networks

Dates

Published: 2024-08-02 08:27

License

CC-BY Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International

Additional Metadata

Language:
English

Data and Code Availability Statement:
The data are available in the repository set up in original publication https://osf.io/my9tv/. The full code and technical descriptions on how to run the pipeline are available on the GitHub repository https://github.com/Ecological-Complexity-Lab/eco_ILP