Link Prediction in Bipartite Nested Networks

Product progression: a machine learning approach to forecasting industrial upgrading

Economic complexity methods, and in particular relatedness measures, lack a systematic evaluation and comparison framework. We argue that out-of-sample forecast exercises should play this role, and we compare various machine learning models to set the prediction benchmark. We find that the key object to forecast is the activation of new products, and that tree-based algorithms clearly outperform both the quite strong auto-correlation benchmark and the other supervised algorithms. Interestingly, we find that the best results are obtained in a cross-validation setting, when data about the predicted country was excluded from the training set. Our approach has direct policy implications, providing a quantitative and scientifically tested measure of the feasibility of introducing a new product in a given country.

Distribution of Node Characteristics in Evolving Tripartite Network

Many real-world networks have a natural tripartite structure. Investigating the structure and the behavior of actors in these networks is useful to gain a deeper understanding of their behavior and dynamics. In our paper, we describe an evolving tripartite network using a network model with preferential growth mechanisms and different rules for changing the strength of nodes and the weights of edges. We analyze the characteristics of the strength distribution and behavior of selected nodes and selected actors in this tripartite network. The distributions of these analyzed characteristics follow the power-law under different modeled conditions. Performed simulations have confirmed all these results. Despite its simplicity, the model expresses well the basic properties of the modeled network. It can provide further insights into the behavior of systems with more complex behaviors, such as the multi-actor e-commerce system that we have used as a real basis for the validation of our model.