Interplay between topology and edge weights in real-world graphs: concepts, patterns, and an algorithm

What are the relations between the edge weights and the topology in real-world graphs? Given only the topology of a graph, how can we assign realistic weights to its edges based on the relations? Several trials have been done for edge-weight prediction where some unknown edge weights are predicted with most edge weights known. There are also existing works on generating both topology and edge weights of weighted graphs. Differently, we are interested in generating edge weights that are realistic in a macroscopic scope, merely from the topology, which is unexplored and challenging. To this end, we explore and exploit the patterns involving edge weights and topology in real-world graphs. Specifically, we divide each graph into layers where each layer consists of the edges with weights at least a threshold. We observe consistent and surprising patterns appearing in multiple layers: the similarity between being adjacent and having high weights, and the nearly-linear growth of the fraction of edges having high weights with the number of common neighbors. We also observe a power-law pattern that connects the layers. Based on the observations, we propose PEAR, an algorithm assigning realistic edge weights to a given topology. The algorithm relies on only two parameters, preserves all the observed patterns, and produces more realistic weights than the baseline methods with more parameters.