11,297 research outputs found
Transforming Graph Representations for Statistical Relational Learning
Relational data representations have become an increasingly important topic
due to the recent proliferation of network datasets (e.g., social, biological,
information networks) and a corresponding increase in the application of
statistical relational learning (SRL) algorithms to these domains. In this
article, we examine a range of representation issues for graph-based relational
data. Since the choice of relational data representation for the nodes, links,
and features can dramatically affect the capabilities of SRL algorithms, we
survey approaches and opportunities for relational representation
transformation designed to improve the performance of these algorithms. This
leads us to introduce an intuitive taxonomy for data representation
transformations in relational domains that incorporates link transformation and
node transformation as symmetric representation tasks. In particular, the
transformation tasks for both nodes and links include (i) predicting their
existence, (ii) predicting their label or type, (iii) estimating their weight
or importance, and (iv) systematically constructing their relevant features. We
motivate our taxonomy through detailed examples and use it to survey and
compare competing approaches for each of these tasks. We also discuss general
conditions for transforming links, nodes, and features. Finally, we highlight
challenges that remain to be addressed
Analysis of group evolution prediction in complex networks
In the world, in which acceptance and the identification with social
communities are highly desired, the ability to predict evolution of groups over
time appears to be a vital but very complex research problem. Therefore, we
propose a new, adaptable, generic and mutli-stage method for Group Evolution
Prediction (GEP) in complex networks, that facilitates reasoning about the
future states of the recently discovered groups. The precise GEP modularity
enabled us to carry out extensive and versatile empirical studies on many
real-world complex / social networks to analyze the impact of numerous setups
and parameters like time window type and size, group detection method,
evolution chain length, prediction models, etc. Additionally, many new
predictive features reflecting the group state at a given time have been
identified and tested. Some other research problems like enriching learning
evolution chains with external data have been analyzed as well
DEMON: a Local-First Discovery Method for Overlapping Communities
Community discovery in complex networks is an interesting problem with a
number of applications, especially in the knowledge extraction task in social
and information networks. However, many large networks often lack a particular
community organization at a global level. In these cases, traditional graph
partitioning algorithms fail to let the latent knowledge embedded in modular
structure emerge, because they impose a top-down global view of a network. We
propose here a simple local-first approach to community discovery, able to
unveil the modular organization of real complex networks. This is achieved by
democratically letting each node vote for the communities it sees surrounding
it in its limited view of the global system, i.e. its ego neighborhood, using a
label propagation algorithm; finally, the local communities are merged into a
global collection. We tested this intuition against the state-of-the-art
overlapping and non-overlapping community discovery methods, and found that our
new method clearly outperforms the others in the quality of the obtained
communities, evaluated by using the extracted communities to predict the
metadata about the nodes of several real world networks. We also show how our
method is deterministic, fully incremental, and has a limited time complexity,
so that it can be used on web-scale real networks.Comment: 9 pages; Proceedings of the 18th ACM SIGKDD International Conference
on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining, Beijing, China, August 12-16, 201
Online Social Networks: Measurements, Analysis and Solutions for Mining Challenges
In the last decade, online social networks showed enormous growth. With the rise
of these networks and the consequent availability of wealth social network data, Social
Network Analysis (SNA) led researchers to get the opportunity to access, analyse and
mine the social behaviour of millions of people, explore the way they communicate and
exchange information.
Despite the growing interest in analysing social networks, there are some challenges
and implications accompanying the analysis and mining of these networks. For example,
dealing with large-scale and evolving networks is not yet an easy task and still requires
a new mining solution. In addition, finding communities within these networks is a
challenging task and could open opportunities to see how people behave in groups on a
large scale. Also, the challenge of validating and optimizing communities without knowing
in advance the structure of the network due to the lack of ground truth is yet another
challenging barrier for validating the meaningfulness of the resulting communities.
In this thesis, we started by providing an overview of the necessary background and key
concepts required in the area of social networks analysis. Our main focus is to provide
solutions to tackle the key challenges in this area. For doing so, first, we introduce a predictive
technique to help in the prediction of the execution time of the analysis tasks for
evolving networks through employing predictive modeling techniques to the problem of
evolving and large-scale networks. Second, we study the performance of existing community
detection approaches to derive high quality community structure using a real email
network through analysing the exchange of emails and exploring community dynamics.
The aim is to study the community behavioral patterns and evaluate their quality within
an actual network. Finally, we propose an ensemble technique for deriving communities
using a rich internal enterprise real network in IBM that reflects real collaborations
and communications between employees. The technique aims to improve the community
detection process through the fusion of different algorithms
Toward link predictability of complex networks
The organization of real networks usually embodies both regularities and irregularities, and, in principle, the former can be modeled. The extent to which the formation of a network can be explained coincides with our ability to predict missing links. To understand network organization, we should be able to estimate link predictability. We assume that the regularity of a network is reflected in the consistency of structural features before and after a random removal of a small set of links. Based on the perturbation of the adjacency matrix, we propose a universal structural consistency index that is free of prior knowledge of network organization. Extensive experiments on disparate real-world networks demonstrate that (i) structural consistency is a good estimation of link predictability and (ii) a derivative algorithm outperforms state-of-the-art link prediction methods in both accuracy and robustness. This analysis has further applications in evaluating link prediction algorithms and monitoring sudden changes in evolving network mechanisms. It will provide unique fundamental insights into the above-mentioned academic research fields, and will foster the development of advanced information filtering technologies of interest to information technology practitioners
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