  Link prediction is a key aspect of graph machine learning, with applications
as diverse as disease prediction, social network recommendations, and drug
discovery. It involves predicting new links that may form between network
nodes. Despite the clear importance of link prediction, existing models have
significant shortcomings. Graph Convolutional Networks, for instance, have been
proven to be highly efficient for link prediction on a variety of datasets.
However, they encounter severe limitations when applied to short-path networks
and ego networks, resulting in poor performance. This presents a critical
problem space that this work aims to address. In this paper, we present the
Node Centrality and Similarity Based Parameterised Model (NCSM), a novel method
for link prediction tasks. NCSM uniquely integrates node centrality and
similarity measures as edge features in a customised Graph Neural Network (GNN)
layer, effectively leveraging the topological information of large networks.
This model represents the first parameterised GNN-based link prediction model
that considers topological information. The proposed model was evaluated on
five benchmark graph datasets, each comprising thousands of nodes and edges.
Experimental results highlight NCSM's superiority over existing
state-of-the-art models like Graph Convolutional Networks and Variational Graph
Autoencoder, as it outperforms them across various metrics and datasets. This
exceptional performance can be attributed to NCSM's innovative integration of
node centrality, similarity measures, and its efficient use of topological
information.
