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Network meta-analysis and random walks.

ABSTRACT: Network meta-analysis (NMA) is a central tool for evidence synthesis in clinical research. The results of an NMA depend critically on the quality of evidence being pooled. In assessing the validity of an NMA, it is therefore important to know the proportion contributions of each direct treatment comparison to each network treatment effect. The construction of proportion contributions is based on the observation that each row of the hat matrix represents a so-called "evidence flow network" for each treatment comparison. However, the existing algorithm used to calculate these values is associated with ambiguity according to the selection of paths. In this article, we present a novel analogy between NMA and random walks. We use this analogy to derive closed-form expressions for the proportion contributions. A random walk on a graph is a stochastic process that describes a succession of random "hops" between vertices which are connected by an edge. The weight of an edge relates to the probability that the walker moves along that edge. We use the graph representation of NMA to construct the transition matrix for a random walk on the network of evidence. We show that the net number of times a walker crosses each edge of the network is related to the evidence flow network. By then defining a random walk on the directed evidence flow network, we derive analytically the matrix of proportion contributions. The random-walk approach has none of the associated ambiguity of the existing algorithm.

SUBMITTER: Davies AL

PROVIDER: S-EPMC9311228 | biostudies-literature |

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

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Project description:Large-scale network mining and analysis is key to revealing the underlying dynamics of networks, not easily observable before. Lately, there is a fast-growing interest in learning low-dimensional continuous representations of networks that can be utilized to perform highly accurate and scalable graph mining tasks. A family of these methods is based on performing random walks on a network to learn its structural features and providing the sequence of random walks as input to a deep learning architecture to learn a network embedding. While these methods perform well, they can only operate on static networks. However, in real-world, networks are evolving, as nodes and edges are continuously added or deleted. As a result, any previously obtained network representation will now be outdated having an adverse effect on the accuracy of the network mining task at stake. The naive approach to address this problem is to re-apply the embedding method of choice every time there is an update to the network. But this approach has serious drawbacks. First, it is inefficient, because the embedding method itself is computationally expensive. Then, the network mining task outcome obtained by the subsequent network representations are not directly comparable to each other, due to the randomness involved in the new set of random walks involved each time. In this paper, we propose EvoNRL, a random-walk based method for learning representations of evolving networks. The key idea of our approach is to first obtain a set of random walks on the current state of network. Then, while changes occur in the evolving network's topology, to dynamically update the random walks in reserve, so they do not introduce any bias. That way we are in position of utilizing the updated set of random walks to continuously learn accurate mappings from the evolving network to a low-dimension network representation. Moreover, we present an analytical method for determining the right time to obtain a new representation of the evolving network that balances accuracy and time performance. A thorough experimental evaluation is performed that demonstrates the effectiveness of our method against sensible baselines and varying conditions.

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Network meta-analysis and random walks.

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