240 research outputs found
Active Discovery of Network Roles for Predicting the Classes of Network Nodes
Nodes in real world networks often have class labels, or underlying
attributes, that are related to the way in which they connect to other nodes.
Sometimes this relationship is simple, for instance nodes of the same class are
may be more likely to be connected. In other cases, however, this is not true,
and the way that nodes link in a network exhibits a different, more complex
relationship to their attributes. Here, we consider networks in which we know
how the nodes are connected, but we do not know the class labels of the nodes
or how class labels relate to the network links. We wish to identify the best
subset of nodes to label in order to learn this relationship between node
attributes and network links. We can then use this discovered relationship to
accurately predict the class labels of the rest of the network nodes.
We present a model that identifies groups of nodes with similar link
patterns, which we call network roles, using a generative blockmodel. The model
then predicts labels by learning the mapping from network roles to class labels
using a maximum margin classifier. We choose a subset of nodes to label
according to an iterative margin-based active learning strategy. By integrating
the discovery of network roles with the classifier optimisation, the active
learning process can adapt the network roles to better represent the network
for node classification. We demonstrate the model by exploring a selection of
real world networks, including a marine food web and a network of English
words. We show that, in contrast to other network classifiers, this model
achieves good classification accuracy for a range of networks with different
relationships between class labels and network links
Supervised Blockmodelling
Collective classification models attempt to improve classification
performance by taking into account the class labels of related instances.
However, they tend not to learn patterns of interactions between classes and/or
make the assumption that instances of the same class link to each other
(assortativity assumption). Blockmodels provide a solution to these issues,
being capable of modelling assortative and disassortative interactions, and
learning the pattern of interactions in the form of a summary network. The
Supervised Blockmodel provides good classification performance using link
structure alone, whilst simultaneously providing an interpretable summary of
network interactions to allow a better understanding of the data. This work
explores three variants of supervised blockmodels of varying complexity and
tests them on four structurally different real world networks.Comment: Workshop on Collective Learning and Inference on Structured Data 201
Corporate payments networks and credit risk rating
Aggregate and systemic risk in complex systems are emergent phenomena
depending on two properties: the idiosyncratic risks of the elements and the
topology of the network of interactions among them. While a significant
attention has been given to aggregate risk assessment and risk propagation once
the above two properties are given, less is known about how the risk is
distributed in the network and its relations with the topology. We study this
problem by investigating a large proprietary dataset of payments among 2.4M
Italian firms, whose credit risk rating is known. We document significant
correlations between local topological properties of a node (firm) and its
risk. Moreover we show the existence of an homophily of risk, i.e. the tendency
of firms with similar risk profile to be statistically more connected among
themselves. This effect is observed when considering both pairs of firms and
communities or hierarchies identified in the network. We leverage this
knowledge to show the predictability of the missing rating of a firm using only
the network properties of the associated node
Assortative-Constrained Stochastic Block Models
Stochastic block models (SBMs) are often used to find assortative community
structures in networks, such that the probability of connections within
communities is higher than in between communities. However, classic SBMs are
not limited to assortative structures. In this study, we discuss the
implications of this model-inherent indifference towards assortativity or
disassortativity, and show that this characteristic can lead to undesirable
outcomes for networks which are presupposedy assortative but which contain a
reduced amount of information. To circumvent this issue, we introduce a
constrained SBM that imposes strong assortativity constraints, along with
efficient algorithmic approaches to solve it. These constraints significantly
boost community recovery capabilities in regimes that are close to the
information-theoretic threshold. They also permit to identify
structurally-different communities in networks representing cerebral-cortex
activity regions
- …