Estimating trade flow based on network topology

Betweenness is often considered as a direct or slightly modified approximation of real-life flow in the study of transport networks. We test this assumption by comparing the estimated traffic pattern with the real-life traffic pattern of 53 international trade networks. The results reveal that there are fundamental differences between these two traffic patterns, and that betweenness is not a good flow estimator. To calculate the modified betweenness, we propose a new algorithm that assumes the following: (1) the transport requirement sent and received by any pair of nodes is in proportion to the product of their node transport requirements and in inverse proportion to their network distance, and (2) each node transport requirement is in proportion to the corresponding node modified betweenness. The resulting modified betweenness networks have reproduced most real-life traffic patterns with a similar probability density distribution of flow, local heterogeneity of flow distribution, and weighted average nearest-neighbours flow.