Distances and Isomorphism between Networks and the Stability of Network Invariants

We develop the theoretical foundations of a network distance that has recently been applied to various subfields of topological data analysis, namely persistent homology and hierarchical clustering. While this network distance has previously appeared in the context of finite networks, we extend the setting to that of compact networks. The main challenge in this new setting is the lack of an easy notion of sampling from compact networks; we solve this problem in the process of obtaining our results. The generality of our setting means that we automatically establish results for exotic objects such as directed metric spaces and Finsler manifolds. We identify readily computable network invariants and establish their quantitative stability under this network distance. We also discuss the computational complexity involved in precisely computing this distance, and develop easily-computable lower bounds by using the identified invariants. By constructing a wide range of explicit examples, we show that these lower bounds are effective in distinguishing between networks. Finally, we provide a simple algorithm that computes a lower bound on the distance between two networks in polynomial time and illustrate our metric and invariant constructions on a database of random networks and a database of simulated hippocampal networks

Sampling random graph homomorphisms and applications to network data analysis

A graph homomorphism is a map between two graphs that preserves adjacency relations. We consider the problem of sampling a random graph homomorphism from a graph $F$ into a large network $\mathcal{G}$. We propose two complementary MCMC algorithms for sampling a random graph homomorphisms and establish bounds on their mixing times and concentration of their time averages. Based on our sampling algorithms, we propose a novel framework for network data analysis that circumvents some of the drawbacks in methods based on independent and neigborhood sampling. Various time averages of the MCMC trajectory give us various computable observables, including well-known ones such as homomorphism density and average clustering coefficient and their generalizations. Furthermore, we show that these network observables are stable with respect to a suitably renormalized cut distance between networks. We provide various examples and simulations demonstrating our framework through synthetic networks. We also apply our framework for network clustering and classification problems using the Facebook100 dataset and Word Adjacency Networks of a set of classic novels.Comment: 51 pages, 33 figures, 2 table

The Metric Space of Networks

We study the question of reconstructing a weighted, directed network up to isomorphism from its motifs. In order to tackle this question we first relax the usual (strong) notion of graph isomorphism to obtain a relaxation that we call weak isomorphism. Then we identify a definition of distance on the space of all networks that is compatible with weak isomorphism. This global approach comes equipped with notions such as completeness, compactness, curves, and geodesics, which we explore throughout this paper. Furthermore, it admits global-to-local inference in the following sense: we prove that two networks are weakly isomorphic if and only if all their motif sets are identical, thus answering the network reconstruction question. Further exploiting the additional structure imposed by our network distance, we prove that two networks are weakly isomorphic if and only if certain essential associated structures---the skeleta of the respective networks---are strongly isomorphic