75,001 research outputs found
Core-periphery structure in directed networks
Empirical networks often exhibit different meso-scale structures, such as community and coreâperiphery structures. Coreâperiphery structure typically consists of a well-connected core and a periphery that is well connected to the core but sparsely connected internally. Most coreâperiphery studies focus on undirected networks. We propose a generalization of coreâperiphery structure to directed networks. Our approach yields a family of coreâperiphery block model formulations in which, contrary to many existing approaches, core and periphery sets are edge-direction dependent. We focus on a particular structure consisting of two core sets and two periphery sets, which we motivate empirically. We propose two measures to assess the statistical significance and quality of our novel structure in empirical data, where one often has no ground truth. To detect coreâperiphery structure in directed networks, we propose three methods adapted from two approaches in the literature, each with a different trade-off between computational complexity and accuracy. We assess the methods on benchmark networks where our methods match or outperform standard methods from the literature, with a likelihood approach achieving the highest accuracy. Applying our methods to three empirical networksâfaculty hiring, a world trade dataset and political blogsâillustrates that our proposed structure provides novel insights in empirical networks
Reconstructing Mesoscale Network Structures
When facing the problem of reconstructing complex mesoscale network structures, it is generally believed that models encoding the nodes organization into modules must be employed. The present paper focuses on two block structures that characterize the empirical mesoscale organization of many real-world networks, i.e., the bow-tie and the core-periphery ones, with the aim of quantifying the minimal amount of topological information that needs to be enforced in order to reproduce the topological details of the former. Our analysis shows that constraining the network degree sequences is often enough to reproduce such structures, as confirmed by model selection criteria as AIC or BIC. As a byproduct, our paper enriches the toolbox for the analysis of bipartite networks, still far from being complete: both the bow-tie and the core-periphery structure, in fact, partition the networks into asymmetric blocks characterized by binary, directed connections, thus calling for the extension of a recently proposed method to randomize undirected, bipartite networks to the directed case
Graphlet-based Characterization of Directed Networks
We are flooded with large-scale, dynamic, directed, networked data. Analyses requiring exact comparisons between networks are computationally intractable, so new methodologies are sought. To analyse directed networks, we extend graphlets (small induced sub-graphs) and their degrees to directed data. Using these directed graphlets, we generalise state-of-the-art network distance measures (RGF, GDDA and GCD) to directed networks and show their superiority for comparing directed networks. Also, we extend the canonical correlation analysis framework that enables uncovering the relationships between the wiring
patterns around nodes in a directed network and their expert annotations. On directed World Trade Networks (WTNs), our methodology allows uncovering the core-broker-periphery structure of the WTN, predicting the economic attributes of a country, such as its gross domestic product, from its wiring patterns in the WTN for up-to ten years in the future. It does so by enabling us to track the dynamics of a countryâs positioning in the WTN over years. On directed metabolic networks, our framework
yields insights into preservation of enzyme function from the network wiring patterns rather than from sequence data. Overall, our methodology enables advanced analyses of directed networked data from any area of science, allowing domain-specific interpretation of a directed networkâs topology
Structural efficiency of percolation landscapes in flow networks
Complex networks characterized by global transport processes rely on the
presence of directed paths from input to output nodes and edges, which organize
in characteristic linked components. The analysis of such network-spanning
structures in the framework of percolation theory, and in particular the key
role of edge interfaces bridging the communication between core and periphery,
allow us to shed light on the structural properties of real and theoretical
flow networks, and to define criteria and quantities to characterize their
efficiency at the interplay between structure and functionality. In particular,
it is possible to assess that an optimal flow network should look like a "hairy
ball", so to minimize bottleneck effects and the sensitivity to failures.
Moreover, the thorough analysis of two real networks, the Internet
customer-provider set of relationships at the autonomous system level and the
nervous system of the worm Caenorhabditis elegans --that have been shaped by
very different dynamics and in very different time-scales--, reveals that
whereas biological evolution has selected a structure close to the optimal
layout, market competition does not necessarily tend toward the most customer
efficient architecture.Comment: 8 pages, 5 figure
Detecting Core-Periphery Structures by Surprise
Detecting the presence of mesoscale structures in complex networks is of
primary importance. This is especially true for financial networks, whose
structural organization deeply affects their resilience to events like default
cascades, shocks propagation, etc. Several methods have been proposed, so far,
to detect communities, i.e. groups of nodes whose connectivity is significantly
large. Communities, however do not represent the only kind of mesoscale
structures characterizing real-world networks: other examples are provided by
bow-tie structures, core-periphery structures and bipartite structures. Here we
propose a novel method to detect statistically-signifcant bimodular structures,
i.e. either bipartite or core-periphery ones. It is based on a modification of
the surprise, recently proposed for detecting communities. Our variant allows
for bimodular nodes partitions to be revealed, by letting links to be placed
either 1) within the core part and between the core and the periphery parts or
2) just between the (empty) layers of a bipartite network. From a technical
point of view, this is achieved by employing a multinomial hypergeometric
distribution instead of the traditional (binomial) hypergeometric one; as in
the latter case, this allows a p-value to be assigned to any given
(bi)partition of the nodes. To illustrate the performance of our method, we
report the results of its application to several real-world networks, including
social, economic and financial ones.Comment: 11 pages, 10 figures. Python code freely available at
https://github.com/jeroenvldj/bimodular_surpris
The organization of the interbank network and how ECB unconventional measures affected the e-MID overnight market
The topological properties of interbank networks have been discussed widely
in the literature mainly because of their relevance for systemic risk. Here we
propose to use the Stochastic Block Model to investigate and perform a model
selection among several possible two block organizations of the network: these
include bipartite, core-periphery, and modular structures. We apply our method
to the e-MID interbank market in the period 2010-2014 and we show that in
normal conditions the most likely network organization is a bipartite
structure. In exceptional conditions, such as after LTRO, one of the most
important unconventional measures by ECB at the beginning of 2012, the most
likely structure becomes a random one and only in 2014 the e-MID market went
back to a normal bipartite organization. By investigating the strategy of
individual banks, we explore possible explanations and we show that the
disappearance of many lending banks and the strategy switch of a very small set
of banks from borrower to lender is likely at the origin of this structural
change.Comment: 33 pages, 5 figure
Early-warning signals of topological collapse in interbank networks
The financial crisis clearly illustrated the importance of characterizing the
level of 'systemic' risk associated with an entire credit network, rather than
with single institutions. However, the interplay between financial distress and
topological changes is still poorly understood. Here we analyze the quarterly
interbank exposures among Dutch banks over the period 1998-2008, ending with
the crisis. After controlling for the link density, many topological properties
display an abrupt change in 2008, providing a clear - but unpredictable -
signature of the crisis. By contrast, if the heterogeneity of banks'
connectivity is controlled for, the same properties show a gradual transition
to the crisis, starting in 2005 and preceded by an even earlier period during
which anomalous debt loops could have led to the underestimation of
counter-party risk. These early-warning signals are undetectable if the network
is reconstructed from partial bank-specific data, as routinely done. We discuss
important implications for bank regulatory policies.Comment: 28 pages, 23 figures, 1 tabl
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