Link prediction in a MeSH co-occurrence network: preliminary results.

Literature-based discovery (LBD) refers to automatic discovery of implicit relations from the scientific literature. Co-occurrence associations between biomedical concepts are commonly used in LBD. These co-occurrences can be represented as a network that consists of a set of nodes representing concepts and a set of edges representing their relationships (or links). In this paper we propose and evaluate a methodology for link prediction of implicit connections in a network of co-occurring Medical Subject Headings (MeSH®). The proposed approach is complementary to, and may augment, existing LBD methods. Link prediction was performed using Jaccard and Adamic-Adar similarity measures. The preliminary results showed high prediction performance, with area under the ROC curve of 0.78 and 0.82 for the two similarity measures, respectively.