10,175 research outputs found
SoftNet: A Package for the Analysis of Complex Networks
Identifying the most important nodes according to specific centrality indices is an important issue in network analysis. Node metrics based on the computation of functions of the adjacency matrix of a network were defined by Estrada and his collaborators in various papers. This paper describes a MATLAB toolbox for computing such centrality indices using efficient numerical algorithms based on the connection between the Lanczos method and Gauss-type quadrature rules
Discriminative Distance-Based Network Indices with Application to Link Prediction
In large networks, using the length of shortest paths as the distance measure
has shortcomings. A well-studied shortcoming is that extending it to
disconnected graphs and directed graphs is controversial. The second
shortcoming is that a huge number of vertices may have exactly the same score.
The third shortcoming is that in many applications, the distance between two
vertices not only depends on the length of shortest paths, but also on the
number of shortest paths. In this paper, first we develop a new distance
measure between vertices of a graph that yields discriminative distance-based
centrality indices. This measure is proportional to the length of shortest
paths and inversely proportional to the number of shortest paths. We present
algorithms for exact computation of the proposed discriminative indices.
Second, we develop randomized algorithms that precisely estimate average
discriminative path length and average discriminative eccentricity and show
that they give -approximations of these indices. Third, we
perform extensive experiments over several real-world networks from different
domains. In our experiments, we first show that compared to the traditional
indices, discriminative indices have usually much more discriminability. Then,
we show that our randomized algorithms can very precisely estimate average
discriminative path length and average discriminative eccentricity, using only
few samples. Then, we show that real-world networks have usually a tiny average
discriminative path length, bounded by a constant (e.g., 2). Fourth, in order
to better motivate the usefulness of our proposed distance measure, we present
a novel link prediction method, that uses discriminative distance to decide
which vertices are more likely to form a link in future, and show its superior
performance compared to the well-known existing measures
Efficient computation of the Shapley value for game-theoretic network centrality
The Shapley valueâprobably the most important normative payoff division scheme in coalitional gamesâhas recently been advocated as a useful measure of centrality in networks. However, although this approach has a variety of real-world applications (including social and organisational networks, biological networks and communication networks), its computational properties have not been widely studied. To date, the only practicable approach to compute Shapley value-based centrality has been via Monte Carlo simulations which are computationally expensive and not guaranteed to give an exact answer. Against this background, this paper presents the first study of the computational aspects of the Shapley value for network centralities. Specifically, we develop exact analytical formulae for Shapley value-based centrality in both weighted and unweighted networks and develop efficient (polynomial time) and exact algorithms based on them. We empirically evaluate these algorithms on two real-life examples (an infrastructure network representing the topology of the Western States Power Grid and a collaboration network from the field of astrophysics) and demonstrate that they deliver significant speedups over the Monte Carlo approach. Fo
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