Omega-N: Interpretable Structural Node Descriptors and Their Applicability Domain

Abstract

A composite structural index summarises a network in one number, and for a triangle-based index it is spectrally redundant: Tr(A^3) is the third moment of the adjacency spectrum. The non-redundant content sits one level down, in diag(A^3), which depends on eigenvectors and is not spectrally determined. A corollary in the theory paper predicted that the global scalar should tie sharpened spectral baselines rather than beat them, while the node-wise attribution should do better where the number of structural epicentres is unknown. We construct Omega-N by localizing each of the four factors. The direct localization is badly conditioned; two corrections from published practice fix it, a configuration-null excess per factor and a personalized-PageRank neighbourhood at several scales, giving ten interpretable features per node, with no attributes, training or embeddings. Against a recursive feature engine at five levels of recursion, Omega-N wins on three and ties on two of the six in-domain evaluations, the sixth a declared null where every arm returns chance, with ten features against its 28 to 252 before pruning. Two statistics from the graph and labels, not from performance, partition the eight benchmarks without error, and the two they exclude are the two on which it loses. The strongest application is drug-target prioritisation on protein interaction networks: +0.032 to +0.103 AUPRC over a six-feature centrality battery and +0.084 to +0.208 over the four-feature one, across three constructions, replicated on an independent AP-MS network and label source (degree-matched: +0.0723 on STRING, +0.0560 on BioPlex, p=0.00195). Adding Omega-N to centralities plus Node2Vec changes nothing. The claim is narrow and it is the point: ten named features, computed without training, match or beat hand-crafted centralities and a recursive engine, and do not touch learned representations.