Quantum-Classical Link Prediction on Dark Web Hyperlink Graphs
Organizations: Department of Computer Science, Faculty of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, VSB-Technical University of Ostrava, Ostrava, Czech Republic. · IT4Innovations National Supercomputing Center, VSB-Technical University of Ostrava, Ostrava, 708 00, Czech Republic. · Department of Informatics and Statistics, Marine Research Institute, Klaipeda University, Klaipeda, Lithuania.
Abstract
We analyze HTML content and hyperlinks from an offline Tor crawl containing 383 onion hosts and 2,067 directed cross-host links. The study combines semantic analysis with degree-controlled quantum--classical link prediction. Two directory groups emit 94.8% of the observed host links. Directed preferential attachment reaches ROC-AUC 0.976 with random non-edges, but falls to under source-conditioned target-degree matching. With disjoint training and test pairs, multimodal logistic regression reaches , GAE , and VGAE . A four-qubit variational quantum classifier (VQC) comparison tests two encodings across 20 disjoint-pair graph splits under exact and 1,024-shot simulation, with classical controls using the same inputs and training examples. Its best exact mean ROC-AUC is , compared with for RBF SVC and for a 16-parameter MLP on the same inputs and training examples. These results support predictive signal in combined graph/content features and show why degree control, feature compression, and optimization conditions matter in quantum--classical comparisons.
Figures & tables
| Quantity | Value |
| HTTP-200 pages | 1,000 |
| Largest HTTP-200 weak component | 998 pages |
| Directed page edges in core | 13,515 |
| Onion hosts in core | 383 |
| Distinct directed cross-host edges | 2,067 |
| Host-graph density | 0.0141 |
| Text view | NMI | AMI | ARI |
|---|---|---|---|
| Raw visible | 0.126 | 0.096 | -0.008 |
| Boilerplate clean | 0.175 | 0.145 | |
| Boilerplate + porn filtered | 0.175 | 0.145 |
| Descriptive group | Hosts | Internal outgoing weight |
|---|---|---|
| French-language local/alternative media | 19 | — |
| Russian-language darknet portals/marketplaces | 14 | 26.7% |
| Drug-related storefronts | 13 | — |
| OnionMail / encrypted mail | 22 | — |
| Tor navigation directories | 8 | 0.0% |
| Tor search/link directories | 47 | 6.4% |
| Model | Random | Topology-hard | Semantic-hard |
|---|---|---|---|
| Directed preferential attachment | |||
| Graph logistic regression | |||
| Multimodal logistic regression | |||
| Raw-content logistic regression | |||
| Boilerplate-clean content | |||
| Boilerplate + porn filtered |
| Negative sampler | PA ROC-AUC | source out | target in |
|---|---|---|---|
| Random | 3.146 | 0.951 | |
| Directed degree-corrected | 0.411 | 0.241 | |
| Source-conditioned degree-matched | 0.000 | 0.125 |
| Model | ROC-AUC | Average precision |
|---|---|---|
| Directed multimodal VGAE | ||
| Directed multimodal GAE | ||
| Multimodal logistic regression | ||
| 8-D RBF SVC | ||
| Content logistic regression | ||
| Graph logistic regression |
| PCA dim. | Explained var. | Logistic regression | MLP-16 | RBF SVC |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2 | 0.121 | |||
| 4 | 0.177 | |||
| 6 | 0.223 | |||
| 8 | 0.262 | |||
| 12 | 0.315 | |||
| 16 | 0.359 |
| Model | MRR | H@1 | H@3 | H@10 | Median rank |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Preferential attachment | 0.070 | 0.143 | 0.367 | 16.3 | |
| Multimodal logistic regression | 0.012 | 0.058 | 0.218 | 30.0 | |
| GAE | 0.072 | 0.216 | 0.504 | 10.5 | |
| VGAE | 0.085 | 0.222 | 0.528 | 9.7 |
| Model / optimizer | Parameters | Exact ROC-AUC | 1,024-shot ROC-AUC |
|---|---|---|---|
| VQC ( ) + COBYLA | 16 | ||
| VQC ( ) + SPSA | 16 | ||
| VQC (ZZ) + COBYLA | 16 | ||
| VQC (ZZ) + SPSA | 16 | ||
| MLP + COBYLA | 16 | — | |
| MLP + SPSA | 16 | — |
Link Prediction
Link prediction estimates missing or future relationships in graphs, from social ties and knowledge-graph facts to biological interactions.
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