A) Example input network with sources, targets, and undirected edges. Each edge is given a weight (lower values indicate higher confidence). The total distance from each source to each target is 2.0. B) The corresponding oriented network. Nodes and edges that do not lie within a path of

hops from any source-target pair are purged (shown dashed in A). The red arrow indicates an edge prediction (

) that globally minimizes the distance between each source and target using the S
hortcuts objective function. The new distance is 1.2. C) The corresponding example using the S
hortcuts-X objective function with

. Here, the total hop-restricted distance between each source and target is higher (4.4) and the optimal edge,

reduces the distance to 1.6.