104,960 research outputs found
Characterizing the community structure of complex networks
Community structure is one of the key properties of complex networks and
plays a crucial role in their topology and function. While an impressive amount
of work has been done on the issue of community detection, very little
attention has been so far devoted to the investigation of communities in real
networks. We present a systematic empirical analysis of the statistical
properties of communities in large information, communication, technological,
biological, and social networks. We find that the mesoscopic organization of
networks of the same category is remarkably similar. This is reflected in
several characteristics of community structure, which can be used as
``fingerprints'' of specific network categories. While community size
distributions are always broad, certain categories of networks consist mainly
of tree-like communities, while others have denser modules. Average path
lengths within communities initially grow logarithmically with community size,
but the growth saturates or slows down for communities larger than a
characteristic size. This behaviour is related to the presence of hubs within
communities, whose roles differ across categories. Also the community
embeddedness of nodes, measured in terms of the fraction of links within their
communities, has a characteristic distribution for each category. Our findings
are verified by the use of two fundamentally different community detection
methods.Comment: 15 pages, 20 figures, 4 table
A novel framework for community modeling and characterization in directed temporal networks
Abstract We deal with the problem of modeling and characterizing the community structure of complex systems. First, we propose a mathematical model for directed temporal networks based on the paradigm of activity driven networks. Many features of real-world systems are encapsulated in our model, such as hierarchical and overlapping community structures, heterogeneous attitude of nodes in behaving as sources or drains for connections, and the existence of a backbone of links that model dyadic relationships between nodes. Second, we develop a method for parameter identification of temporal networks based on the analysis of the integrated network of connections. Starting from any existing community detection algorithm, our method enriches the obtained solution by providing an in-depth characterization of the very nature of the role of nodes and communities in generating the temporal link structure. The proposed modeling and characterization framework is validated on three synthetic benchmarks and two real-world case studies
Scaling theory of fractal complex networks
We show that fractality in complex networks arises from the geometric
self-similarity of their built-in hierarchical community-like structure, which
is mathematically described by the scale-invariant equation for the masses of
the boxes with which we cover the network when determining its box dimension.
This approach - grounded in both scaling theory of phase transitions and
renormalization group theory - leads to the consistent scaling theory of
fractal complex networks, which complements the collection of scaling exponents
with several new ones and reveals various relationships between them. We
propose the introduction of two classes of exponents: microscopic and
macroscopic, characterizing the local structure of fractal complex networks and
their global properties, respectively. Interestingly, exponents from both
classes are related to each other and only a few of them (three out of seven)
are independent, thus bridging the local self-similarity and global
scale-invariance in fractal networks. We successfully verify our findings in
real networks situated in various fields (information - the World Wide Web,
biological - the human brain, and social - scientific collaboration networks)
and in several fractal network models.Comment: 18 pages, 7 figures; the paper is theoretical in nature; theoretical
predictions have been succesfully verified in real networks (WWW, DBLP, human
brain) and in several fractal network models (SHM-model, (u,v)-flowers ,
nested BA networks
Evolution of Network Architecture in a Granular Material Under Compression
As a granular material is compressed, the particles and forces within the system arrange to form complex and heterogeneous collective structures. Force chains are a prime example of such structures, and are thought to constrain bulk properties such as mechanical stability and acoustic transmission. However, capturing and characterizing the evolving nature of the intrinsic inhomogeneity and mesoscale architecture of granular systems can be challenging. A growing body of work has shown that graph theoretic approaches may provide a useful foundation for tackling these problems. Here, we extend the current approaches by utilizing multilayer networks as a framework for directly quantifying the progression of mesoscale architecture in a compressed granular system. We examine a quasi-two-dimensional aggregate of photoelastic disks, subject to biaxial compressions through a series of small, quasistatic steps. Treating particles as network nodes and interparticle forces as network edges, we construct a multilayer network for the system by linking together the series of static force networks that exist at each strain step. We then extract the inherent mesoscale structure from the system by using a generalization of community detection methods to multilayer networks, and we define quantitative measures to characterize the changes in this structure throughout the compression process. We separately consider the network of normal and tangential forces, and find that they display a different progression throughout compression. To test the sensitivity of the network model to particle properties, we examine whether the method can distinguish a subsystem of low-friction particles within a bath of higher-friction particles. We find that this can be achieved by considering the network of tangential forces, and that the community structure is better able to separate the subsystem than a purely local measure of interparticle forces alone. The results discussed throughout this study suggest that these network science techniques may provide a direct way to compare and classify data from systems under different external conditions or with different physical makeup
Closed benchmarks for network community structure characterization
Characterizing the community structure of complex networks is a key challenge
in many scientific fields. Very diverse algorithms and methods have been
proposed to this end, many working reasonably well in specific situations.
However, no consensus has emerged on which of these methods is the best to use
in practice. In part, this is due to the fact that testing their performance
requires the generation of a comprehensive, standard set of synthetic
benchmarks, a goal not yet fully achieved. Here, we present a type of benchmark
that we call "closed", in which an initial network of known community structure
is progressively converted into a second network whose communities are also
known. This approach differs from all previously published ones, in which
networks evolve toward randomness. The use of this type of benchmark allows us
to monitor the transformation of the community structure of a network.
Moreover, we can predict the optimal behavior of the variation of information,
a measure of the quality of the partitions obtained, at any moment of the
process. This enables us in many cases to determine the best partition among
those suggested by different algorithms. Also, since any network can be used as
a starting point, extensive studies and comparisons can be performed using a
heterogeneous set of structures, including random ones. These properties make
our benchmarks a general standard for comparing community detection algorithms.Comment: 18 pages, 5 figures. Available at
http://pre.aps.org/abstract/PRE/v85/i2/e02610
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
Interdisciplinary and physics challenges of Network Theory
Network theory has unveiled the underlying structure of complex systems such
as the Internet or the biological networks in the cell. It has identified
universal properties of complex networks, and the interplay between their
structure and dynamics. After almost twenty years of the field, new challenges
lie ahead. These challenges concern the multilayer structure of most of the
networks, the formulation of a network geometry and topology, and the
development of a quantum theory of networks. Making progress on these aspects
of network theory can open new venues to address interdisciplinary and physics
challenges including progress on brain dynamics, new insights into quantum
technologies, and quantum gravity.Comment: (7 pages, 4 figures
A complex network approach reveals pivotal sub-structure of genes linked to Schizophrenia
Research on brain disorders with a strong genetic component and complex heritability,
like schizophrenia and autism, has promoted the development of brain transcriptomics.
This research field deals with the deep understanding of how gene-gene interactions
impact on risk for heritable brain disorders. With this perspective, we developed a novel
data-driven strategy for characterizing genetic modules, i.e., clusters, also called
community, of strongly interacting genes. The aim is to uncover a pivotal module of
genes by gaining biological insight upon them. Our approach combined network
topological properties, to highlight the presence of a pivotal community, matchted with
information theory, to assess the informativeness of partitions. Shannon entropy of the complex networks based on average betweenness of the nodes is adopted for this
purpose. We analyzed the publicly available BrainCloud dataset, containing
post-mortem gene expression data and we focused on the Dopamine Receptor D2,
encoded by the DRD2 gene. To parse the DRD2 community into sub-structure, we
applied and compared four different community detection algorithms. A pivotal DRD2
module emerged for all procedures applied and it represented a considerable reduction,
compared with the beginning network size. Dice index 80% for the detected
community confirmed the stability of the results, in a wide range of tested parameters.
The detected community was also the most informative, as it represented an
optimization of the Shannon entropy. Lastly, we verified that the DRD2 was strongly
connected to its neighborhood, stronger than any other randomly selected community
and more than the Weighted Gene Coexpression Network Analysis (WGCNA) module,
commonly considered the standard approach for these studies
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