Summary This paper discusses the importance of feature extraction and structure similarity measurement in the analysis of complex networks. Social networks, biological systems, and transportation networks are just a few examples of the many phenomena that have been modeled using complex networks. However, analyzing these networks can be challenging due to their large size and complexity. Feature extraction techniques can help to simplify the network by identifying key nodes or substructures. Structure similarity measurement techniques can be used to compare different networks and identify similarities and differences between them. Previous research has suggested that real‐world complex networks are influenced by multiplex features and either local or global features. However, the interaction between these characteristics is not well understood. The proposed approach outperforms other graph similarity methods on publicly available datasets, with accurate estimations of overall complex network structures. Specifically, the approach based on cosine similarity outperforms as compared to existing methods. Overall, this study highlights the importance of considering various graph features–local and global features and their interactions in the analysis of complex networks.

Link prediction is one of the most essential and crucial tasks in complex network research since it seeks to forecast missing links in a network based on current ones. This problem has applications in a variety of scientific disciplines, including social network research, recommendation systems, and biological networks. In previous work, link prediction has been solved through different methods such as path, social theory, topology, and similarity-based. The main issue is that path-based methods ignore topological features, while structure-based methods also fail to combine the path and structured-based features. As a result, a new technique based on the shortest path and topological features’ has been developed. The method uses both local and global similarity indices to measure the similarity. Extensive experiments on real-world datasets from a variety of domains are utilized to empirically test and compare the proposed framework to many state-of-the-art prediction techniques. Over 100 iterations, the collected data showed that the proposed method improved on the other methods in terms of accuracy. SI and AA, among the existing state-of-the-art algorithms, fared best with an AUC value of 82%, while the proposed method has an AUC value of 84%.