1,175 research outputs found
Relevance of Negative Links in Graph Partitioning: A Case Study Using Votes From the European Parliament
In this paper, we want to study the informative value of negative links in
signed complex networks. For this purpose, we extract and analyze a collection
of signed networks representing voting sessions of the European Parliament
(EP). We first process some data collected by the VoteWatch Europe Website for
the whole 7 th term (2009-2014), by considering voting similarities between
Members of the EP to define weighted signed links. We then apply a selection of
community detection algorithms, designed to process only positive links, to
these data. We also apply Parallel Iterative Local Search (Parallel ILS), an
algorithm recently proposed to identify balanced partitions in signed networks.
Our results show that, contrary to the conclusions of a previous study focusing
on other data, the partitions detected by ignoring or considering the negative
links are indeed remarkably different for these networks. The relevance of
negative links for graph partitioning therefore is an open question which
should be further explored.Comment: in 2nd European Network Intelligence Conference (ENIC), Sep 2015,
Karlskrona, Swede
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
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