13,421 research outputs found
A statistical network analysis of the HIV/AIDS epidemics in Cuba
The Cuban contact-tracing detection system set up in 1986 allowed the
reconstruction and analysis of the sexual network underlying the epidemic
(5,389 vertices and 4,073 edges, giant component of 2,386 nodes and 3,168
edges), shedding light onto the spread of HIV and the role of contact-tracing.
Clustering based on modularity optimization provides a better visualization and
understanding of the network, in combination with the study of covariates. The
graph has a globally low but heterogeneous density, with clusters of high
intraconnectivity but low interconnectivity. Though descriptive, our results
pave the way for incorporating structure when studying stochastic SIR epidemics
spreading on social networks
Detecting and Tracking the Spread of Astroturf Memes in Microblog Streams
Online social media are complementing and in some cases replacing
person-to-person social interaction and redefining the diffusion of
information. In particular, microblogs have become crucial grounds on which
public relations, marketing, and political battles are fought. We introduce an
extensible framework that will enable the real-time analysis of meme diffusion
in social media by mining, visualizing, mapping, classifying, and modeling
massive streams of public microblogging events. We describe a Web service that
leverages this framework to track political memes in Twitter and help detect
astroturfing, smear campaigns, and other misinformation in the context of U.S.
political elections. We present some cases of abusive behaviors uncovered by
our service. Finally, we discuss promising preliminary results on the detection
of suspicious memes via supervised learning based on features extracted from
the topology of the diffusion networks, sentiment analysis, and crowdsourced
annotations
The State-of-the-Art of Set Visualization
Sets comprise a generic data model that has been used in a variety of data analysis problems. Such problems involve analysing and visualizing set relations between multiple sets defined over the same collection of elements. However, visualizing sets is a non-trivial problem due to the large number of possible relations between them. We provide a systematic overview of state-of-the-art techniques for visualizing different kinds of set relations. We classify these techniques into six main categories according to the visual representations they use and the tasks they support. We compare the categories to provide guidance for choosing an appropriate technique for a given problem. Finally, we identify challenges in this area that need further research and propose possible directions to address these challenges. Further resources on set visualization are available at http://www.setviz.net
Scalable Online Betweenness Centrality in Evolving Graphs
Betweenness centrality is a classic measure that quantifies the importance of
a graph element (vertex or edge) according to the fraction of shortest paths
passing through it. This measure is notoriously expensive to compute, and the
best known algorithm runs in O(nm) time. The problems of efficiency and
scalability are exacerbated in a dynamic setting, where the input is an
evolving graph seen edge by edge, and the goal is to keep the betweenness
centrality up to date. In this paper we propose the first truly scalable
algorithm for online computation of betweenness centrality of both vertices and
edges in an evolving graph where new edges are added and existing edges are
removed. Our algorithm is carefully engineered with out-of-core techniques and
tailored for modern parallel stream processing engines that run on clusters of
shared-nothing commodity hardware. Hence, it is amenable to real-world
deployment. We experiment on graphs that are two orders of magnitude larger
than previous studies. Our method is able to keep the betweenness centrality
measures up to date online, i.e., the time to update the measures is smaller
than the inter-arrival time between two consecutive updates.Comment: 15 pages, 9 Figures, accepted for publication in IEEE Transactions on
Knowledge and Data Engineerin
GraphH: High Performance Big Graph Analytics in Small Clusters
It is common for real-world applications to analyze big graphs using
distributed graph processing systems. Popular in-memory systems require an
enormous amount of resources to handle big graphs. While several out-of-core
approaches have been proposed for processing big graphs on disk, the high disk
I/O overhead could significantly reduce performance. In this paper, we propose
GraphH to enable high-performance big graph analytics in small clusters.
Specifically, we design a two-stage graph partition scheme to evenly divide the
input graph into partitions, and propose a GAB (Gather-Apply-Broadcast)
computation model to make each worker process a partition in memory at a time.
We use an edge cache mechanism to reduce the disk I/O overhead, and design a
hybrid strategy to improve the communication performance. GraphH can
efficiently process big graphs in small clusters or even a single commodity
server. Extensive evaluations have shown that GraphH could be up to 7.8x faster
compared to popular in-memory systems, such as Pregel+ and PowerGraph when
processing generic graphs, and more than 100x faster than recently proposed
out-of-core systems, such as GraphD and Chaos when processing big graphs
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