33,418 research outputs found
A Method for Characterizing Communities in Dynamic Attributed Complex Networks
Many methods have been proposed to detect communities, not only in plain, but
also in attributed, directed or even dynamic complex networks. In its simplest
form, a community structure takes the form of a partition of the node set. From
the modeling point of view, to be of some utility, this partition must then be
characterized relatively to the properties of the studied system. However, if
most of the existing works focus on defining methods for the detection of
communities, only very few try to tackle this interpretation problem. Moreover,
the existing approaches are limited either in the type of data they handle, or
by the nature of the results they output. In this work, we propose a method to
efficiently support such a characterization task. We first define a
sequence-based representation of networks, combining temporal information,
topological measures, and nodal attributes. We then describe how to identify
the most emerging sequential patterns of this dataset, and use them to
characterize the communities. We also show how to detect unusual behavior in a
community, and highlight outliers. Finally, as an illustration, we apply our
method to a network of scientific collaborations.Comment: IEEE/ACM International Conference on Advances in Social Network
Analysis and Mining (ASONAM), P\'ekin : China (2014
Community Structure Characterization
This entry discusses the problem of describing some communities identified in
a complex network of interest, in a way allowing to interpret them. We suppose
the community structure has already been detected through one of the many
methods proposed in the literature. The question is then to know how to extract
valuable information from this first result, in order to allow human
interpretation. This requires subsequent processing, which we describe in the
rest of this entry
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
Characterizing Nodes and Edges in Dynamic Attributed Networks: A Social-based Approach
How to characterize nodes and edges in dynamic attributed networks based on
social aspects? We address this problem by exploring the strength of the ties
between actors and their associated attributes over time, thus capturing the
social roles of the actors and the meaning of their dynamic interactions in
different social network scenarios. For this, we apply social concepts to
promote a better understanding of the underlying complexity that involves
actors and their social motivations. More specifically, we explore the notion
of social capital given by the strategic positioning of a particular actor in a
social structure by means of the concepts of brokerage, the ability of creating
bridges with diversified patterns, and closure, the ability of aggregating
nodes with similar patterns. As a result, we unveil the differences of social
interactions in distinct academic coauthorship networks and questions \&
answers communities. We also statistically validate our social definitions
considering the importance of the nodes and edges in a social structure by
means of network properties.Comment: 11 pages, 5 figure
Intrinsically Dynamic Network Communities
Community finding algorithms for networks have recently been extended to
dynamic data. Most of these recent methods aim at exhibiting community
partitions from successive graph snapshots and thereafter connecting or
smoothing these partitions using clever time-dependent features and sampling
techniques. These approaches are nonetheless achieving longitudinal rather than
dynamic community detection. We assume that communities are fundamentally
defined by the repetition of interactions among a set of nodes over time.
According to this definition, analyzing the data by considering successive
snapshots induces a significant loss of information: we suggest that it blurs
essentially dynamic phenomena - such as communities based on repeated
inter-temporal interactions, nodes switching from a community to another across
time, or the possibility that a community survives while its members are being
integrally replaced over a longer time period. We propose a formalism which
aims at tackling this issue in the context of time-directed datasets (such as
citation networks), and present several illustrations on both empirical and
synthetic dynamic networks. We eventually introduce intrinsically dynamic
metrics to qualify temporal community structure and emphasize their possible
role as an estimator of the quality of the community detection - taking into
account the fact that various empirical contexts may call for distinct
`community' definitions and detection criteria.Comment: 27 pages, 11 figure
Interests Diffusion in Social Networks
Understanding cultural phenomena on Social Networks (SNs) and exploiting the
implicit knowledge about their members is attracting the interest of different
research communities both from the academic and the business side. The
community of complexity science is devoting significant efforts to define laws,
models, and theories, which, based on acquired knowledge, are able to predict
future observations (e.g. success of a product). In the mean time, the semantic
web community aims at engineering a new generation of advanced services by
defining constructs, models and methods, adding a semantic layer to SNs. In
this context, a leapfrog is expected to come from a hybrid approach merging the
disciplines above. Along this line, this work focuses on the propagation of
individual interests in social networks. The proposed framework consists of the
following main components: a method to gather information about the members of
the social networks; methods to perform some semantic analysis of the Domain of
Interest; a procedure to infer members' interests; and an interests evolution
theory to predict how the interests propagate in the network. As a result, one
achieves an analytic tool to measure individual features, such as members'
susceptibilities and authorities. Although the approach applies to any type of
social network, here it is has been tested against the computer science
research community.
The DBLP (Digital Bibliography and Library Project) database has been elected
as test-case since it provides the most comprehensive list of scientific
production in this field.Comment: 30 pages 13 figs 4 table
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