162,319 research outputs found
Networks and the epidemiology of infectious disease
The science of networks has revolutionised research into the dynamics of interacting elements. It could be argued that epidemiology in particular has embraced the potential of network theory more than any other discipline. Here we review the growing body of research concerning the spread of infectious diseases on networks, focusing on the interplay between network theory and epidemiology. The review is split into four main sections, which examine: the types of network relevant to epidemiology; the multitude of ways these networks can be characterised; the statistical methods that can be applied to infer the epidemiological parameters on a realised network; and finally simulation and analytical methods to determine epidemic dynamics on a given network. Given the breadth of areas covered and the ever-expanding number of publications, a comprehensive review of all work is impossible. Instead, we provide a personalised overview into the areas of network epidemiology that have seen the greatest progress in recent years or have the greatest potential to provide novel insights. As such, considerable importance is placed on analytical approaches and statistical methods which are both rapidly expanding fields. Throughout this review we restrict our attention to epidemiological issues
Fluid Communities: A Competitive, Scalable and Diverse Community Detection Algorithm
We introduce a community detection algorithm (Fluid Communities) based on the
idea of fluids interacting in an environment, expanding and contracting as a
result of that interaction. Fluid Communities is based on the propagation
methodology, which represents the state-of-the-art in terms of computational
cost and scalability. While being highly efficient, Fluid Communities is able
to find communities in synthetic graphs with an accuracy close to the current
best alternatives. Additionally, Fluid Communities is the first
propagation-based algorithm capable of identifying a variable number of
communities in network. To illustrate the relevance of the algorithm, we
evaluate the diversity of the communities found by Fluid Communities, and find
them to be significantly different from the ones found by alternative methods.Comment: Accepted at the 6th International Conference on Complex Networks and
Their Application
Indicators of Economic Crises : A Data-Driven Clustering Approach
The determination of reliable early-warning indicators of economic crises is a hot topic in economic sciences. Pinning down recurring patterns or combinations of macroeconomic indicators is indispensable for adequate policy adjustments to prevent a looming crisis. We investigate the ability of several macroeconomic variables telling crisis countries apart from non-crisis economies. We introduce a selfcalibrated clustering-algorithm, which accounts for both similarity and dissimilarity in macroeconomic fundamentals across countries. Furthermore, imposing a desired community structure, we allow the data to decide by itself, which combination of indicators would have most accurately foreseen the exogeneously defined network topology. We quantitatively evaluate the degree of matching between the data-generated clustering and the desired community-structure.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio
Spectral Graph Forge: Graph Generation Targeting Modularity
Community structure is an important property that captures inhomogeneities
common in large networks, and modularity is one of the most widely used metrics
for such community structure. In this paper, we introduce a principled
methodology, the Spectral Graph Forge, for generating random graphs that
preserves community structure from a real network of interest, in terms of
modularity. Our approach leverages the fact that the spectral structure of
matrix representations of a graph encodes global information about community
structure. The Spectral Graph Forge uses a low-rank approximation of the
modularity matrix to generate synthetic graphs that match a target modularity
within user-selectable degree of accuracy, while allowing other aspects of
structure to vary. We show that the Spectral Graph Forge outperforms
state-of-the-art techniques in terms of accuracy in targeting the modularity
and randomness of the realizations, while also preserving other local
structural properties and node attributes. We discuss extensions of the
Spectral Graph Forge to target other properties beyond modularity, and its
applications to anonymization
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