25 research outputs found
Centrality Metric for Dynamic Networks
Centrality is an important notion in network analysis and is used to measure
the degree to which network structure contributes to the importance of a node
in a network. While many different centrality measures exist, most of them
apply to static networks. Most networks, on the other hand, are dynamic in
nature, evolving over time through the addition or deletion of nodes and edges.
A popular approach to analyzing such networks represents them by a static
network that aggregates all edges observed over some time period. This
approach, however, under or overestimates centrality of some nodes. We address
this problem by introducing a novel centrality metric for dynamic network
analysis. This metric exploits an intuition that in order for one node in a
dynamic network to influence another over some period of time, there must exist
a path that connects the source and destination nodes through intermediaries at
different times. We demonstrate on an example network that the proposed metric
leads to a very different ranking than analysis of an equivalent static
network. We use dynamic centrality to study a dynamic citations network and
contrast results to those reached by static network analysis.Comment: in KDD workshop on Mining and Learning in Graphs (MLG
Ranking to Learn: Feature Ranking and Selection via Eigenvector Centrality
In an era where accumulating data is easy and storing it inexpensive, feature
selection plays a central role in helping to reduce the high-dimensionality of
huge amounts of otherwise meaningless data. In this paper, we propose a
graph-based method for feature selection that ranks features by identifying the
most important ones into arbitrary set of cues. Mapping the problem on an
affinity graph-where features are the nodes-the solution is given by assessing
the importance of nodes through some indicators of centrality, in particular,
the Eigen-vector Centrality (EC). The gist of EC is to estimate the importance
of a feature as a function of the importance of its neighbors. Ranking central
nodes individuates candidate features, which turn out to be effective from a
classification point of view, as proved by a thoroughly experimental section.
Our approach has been tested on 7 diverse datasets from recent literature
(e.g., biological data and object recognition, among others), and compared
against filter, embedded and wrappers methods. The results are remarkable in
terms of accuracy, stability and low execution time.Comment: Preprint version - Lecture Notes in Computer Science - Springer 201
A survey on Human Mobility and its applications
Human Mobility has attracted attentions from different fields of studies such
as epidemic modeling, traffic engineering, traffic prediction and urban
planning. In this survey we review major characteristics of human mobility
studies including from trajectory-based studies to studies using graph and
network theory. In trajectory-based studies statistical measures such as jump
length distribution and radius of gyration are analyzed in order to investigate
how people move in their daily life, and if it is possible to model this
individual movements and make prediction based on them. Using graph in mobility
studies, helps to investigate the dynamic behavior of the system, such as
diffusion and flow in the network and makes it easier to estimate how much one
part of the network influences another by using metrics like centrality
measures. We aim to study population flow in transportation networks using
mobility data to derive models and patterns, and to develop new applications in
predicting phenomena such as congestion. Human Mobility studies with the new
generation of mobility data provided by cellular phone networks, arise new
challenges such as data storing, data representation, data analysis and
computation complexity. A comparative review of different data types used in
current tools and applications of Human Mobility studies leads us to new
approaches for dealing with mentioned challenges
Selecting a suitable Parallel Label-propagation based algorithm for Disjoint Community Detection
Community detection is an essential task in network analysis as it helps
identify groups and patterns within a network. High-speed community detection
algorithms are necessary to analyze large-scale networks in a reasonable amount
of time. Researchers have made significant contributions in the development of
high-speed community detection algorithms, particularly in the area of
label-propagation based disjoint community detection. These algorithms have
been proven to be highly effective in analyzing large-scale networks in a
reasonable amount of time. However, it is important to evaluate the performance
and accuracy of these existing methods to determine which algorithm is best
suited for a particular type of network and specific research problem. In this
report, we investigate the RAK, COPRA, and SLPA, three label-propagation-based
static community discovery techniques. We pay close attention to each
algorithm's minute details as we implement both its single-threaded and
multi-threaded OpenMP-based variants, making any necessary adjustments or
optimizations and obtaining the right parameter values. The RAK algorithm is
found to perform well with a tolerance of 0.05 and OpenMP-based strict RAK with
12 threads was 6.75x faster than the sequential non-strict RAK. The COPRA
algorithm works well with a single label for road networks and max labels of
4-16 for other classes of graphs. The SLPA algorithm performs well with
increasing memory size, but overall doesn't offer a favourable return on
investment. The RAK algorithm is recommended for label-propagation based
disjoint community detection.Comment: 11 pages, 1 tabl
Efficient team structures in an open-ended cooperative creativity experiment
Understanding how to best form teams to perform creative tasks is a fascinating although elusive problem. Here we propose an experimental setting for studying the performances of a population of individuals committed to an open-ended cooperative creativity task, namely the construction of LEGO artworks. The real-time parallel monitoring of the growth of the artworks and the structure and composition of the dynamically working teams allow identifying the key ingredients of successful teams. Large teams composed of committed and influential people are more effectively building. Also, there exists an optimal fraction of weak ties in the working teams, i.e., an optimal ratio exploit/explore that maximizes the building efficiency.Creativity is progressively acknowledged as the main driver for progress in all sectors of humankind{ extquoteright}s activities: arts, science, technology, business, and social policies. Nowadays, many creative processes rely on many actors collectively contributing to an outcome. The same is true when groups of people collaborate in the solution of a complex problem. Despite the critical importance of collective actions in human endeavors, few works have tackled this topic extensively and quantitatively. Here we report about an experimental setting to single out some of the key determinants of efficient teams committed to an open-ended creative task. In this experiment, dynamically forming teams were challenged to create several artworks using LEGO bricks. The growth rate of the artworks, the dynamical network of social interactions, and the interaction patterns between the participants and the artworks were monitored in parallel. The experiment revealed that larger working teams are building at faster rates and that higher commitment leads to higher growth rates. Even more importantly, there exists an optimal number of weak ties in the social network of creators that maximizes the growth rate. Finally, the presence of influencers within the working team dramatically enhances the building efficiency. The generality of the approach makes it suitable for application in very different settings, both physical and online, whenever a creative collective outcome is required
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
Centrality measures for graphons: Accounting for uncertainty in networks
As relational datasets modeled as graphs keep increasing in size and their
data-acquisition is permeated by uncertainty, graph-based analysis techniques
can become computationally and conceptually challenging. In particular, node
centrality measures rely on the assumption that the graph is perfectly known --
a premise not necessarily fulfilled for large, uncertain networks. Accordingly,
centrality measures may fail to faithfully extract the importance of nodes in
the presence of uncertainty. To mitigate these problems, we suggest a
statistical approach based on graphon theory: we introduce formal definitions
of centrality measures for graphons and establish their connections to
classical graph centrality measures. A key advantage of this approach is that
centrality measures defined at the modeling level of graphons are inherently
robust to stochastic variations of specific graph realizations. Using the
theory of linear integral operators, we define degree, eigenvector, Katz and
PageRank centrality functions for graphons and establish concentration
inequalities demonstrating that graphon centrality functions arise naturally as
limits of their counterparts defined on sequences of graphs of increasing size.
The same concentration inequalities also provide high-probability bounds
between the graphon centrality functions and the centrality measures on any
sampled graph, thereby establishing a measure of uncertainty of the measured
centrality score. The same concentration inequalities also provide
high-probability bounds between the graphon centrality functions and the
centrality measures on any sampled graph, thereby establishing a measure of
uncertainty of the measured centrality score.Comment: Authors ordered alphabetically, all authors contributed equally. 21
pages, 7 figure