Estimating node similarity from co-citation in a spatial graph model

Abstract

Co-citation (number of nodes linking to both of a given pair of nodes) is often used heuristically to judge similarity between nodes in a complex network. We investigate the relation between node similarity and co-citation in the context of the Spatial Preferred Attachment (SPA) model. The SPA model is a spatial model, where nodes live in a metric space, and nodes that are close together in space are considered similar, and are more likely to link to one another.