20,356 research outputs found
An Ensemble Framework for Detecting Community Changes in Dynamic Networks
Dynamic networks, especially those representing social networks, undergo
constant evolution of their community structure over time. Nodes can migrate
between different communities, communities can split into multiple new
communities, communities can merge together, etc. In order to represent dynamic
networks with evolving communities it is essential to use a dynamic model
rather than a static one. Here we use a dynamic stochastic block model where
the underlying block model is different at different times. In order to
represent the structural changes expressed by this dynamic model the network
will be split into discrete time segments and a clustering algorithm will
assign block memberships for each segment. In this paper we show that using an
ensemble of clustering assignments accommodates for the variance in scalable
clustering algorithms and produces superior results in terms of
pairwise-precision and pairwise-recall. We also demonstrate that the dynamic
clustering produced by the ensemble can be visualized as a flowchart which
encapsulates the community evolution succinctly.Comment: 6 pages, under submission to HPEC Graph Challeng
Benchmark model to assess community structure in evolving networks
Detecting the time evolution of the community structure of networks is
crucial to identify major changes in the internal organization of many complex
systems, which may undergo important endogenous or exogenous events. This
analysis can be done in two ways: considering each snapshot as an independent
community detection problem or taking into account the whole evolution of the
network. In the first case, one can apply static methods on the temporal
snapshots, which correspond to configurations of the system in short time
windows, and match afterwards the communities across layers. Alternatively, one
can develop dedicated dynamic procedures, so that multiple snapshots are
simultaneously taken into account while detecting communities, which allows us
to keep memory of the flow. To check how well a method of any kind could
capture the evolution of communities, suitable benchmarks are needed. Here we
propose a model for generating simple dynamic benchmark graphs, based on
stochastic block models. In them, the time evolution consists of a periodic
oscillation of the system's structure between configurations with built-in
community structure. We also propose the extension of quality comparison
indices to the dynamic scenario.Comment: 11 pages, 7 figures, 3 table
Exploring the Evolution of Node Neighborhoods in Dynamic Networks
Dynamic Networks are a popular way of modeling and studying the behavior of
evolving systems. However, their analysis constitutes a relatively recent
subfield of Network Science, and the number of available tools is consequently
much smaller than for static networks. In this work, we propose a method
specifically designed to take advantage of the longitudinal nature of dynamic
networks. It characterizes each individual node by studying the evolution of
its direct neighborhood, based on the assumption that the way this neighborhood
changes reflects the role and position of the node in the whole network. For
this purpose, we define the concept of \textit{neighborhood event}, which
corresponds to the various transformations such groups of nodes can undergo,
and describe an algorithm for detecting such events. We demonstrate the
interest of our method on three real-world networks: DBLP, LastFM and Enron. We
apply frequent pattern mining to extract meaningful information from temporal
sequences of neighborhood events. This results in the identification of
behavioral trends emerging in the whole network, as well as the individual
characterization of specific nodes. We also perform a cluster analysis, which
reveals that, in all three networks, one can distinguish two types of nodes
exhibiting different behaviors: a very small group of active nodes, whose
neighborhood undergo diverse and frequent events, and a very large group of
stable nodes
A Triclustering Approach for Time Evolving Graphs
This paper introduces a novel technique to track structures in time evolving
graphs. The method is based on a parameter free approach for three-dimensional
co-clustering of the source vertices, the target vertices and the time. All
these features are simultaneously segmented in order to build time segments and
clusters of vertices whose edge distributions are similar and evolve in the
same way over the time segments. The main novelty of this approach lies in that
the time segments are directly inferred from the evolution of the edge
distribution between the vertices, thus not requiring the user to make an a
priori discretization. Experiments conducted on a synthetic dataset illustrate
the good behaviour of the technique, and a study of a real-life dataset shows
the potential of the proposed approach for exploratory data analysis
Detecting change points in the large-scale structure of evolving networks
Interactions among people or objects are often dynamic in nature and can be
represented as a sequence of networks, each providing a snapshot of the
interactions over a brief period of time. An important task in analyzing such
evolving networks is change-point detection, in which we both identify the
times at which the large-scale pattern of interactions changes fundamentally
and quantify how large and what kind of change occurred. Here, we formalize for
the first time the network change-point detection problem within an online
probabilistic learning framework and introduce a method that can reliably solve
it. This method combines a generalized hierarchical random graph model with a
Bayesian hypothesis test to quantitatively determine if, when, and precisely
how a change point has occurred. We analyze the detectability of our method
using synthetic data with known change points of different types and
magnitudes, and show that this method is more accurate than several previously
used alternatives. Applied to two high-resolution evolving social networks,
this method identifies a sequence of change points that align with known
external "shocks" to these networks
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