13,197 research outputs found
Detecting change points in the large-scale structure of evolving networks
Interactions among people or objects are often dynamic in nature and can be
represented as a sequence of networks, each providing a snapshot of the
interactions over a brief period of time. An important task in analyzing such
evolving networks is change-point detection, in which we both identify the
times at which the large-scale pattern of interactions changes fundamentally
and quantify how large and what kind of change occurred. Here, we formalize for
the first time the network change-point detection problem within an online
probabilistic learning framework and introduce a method that can reliably solve
it. This method combines a generalized hierarchical random graph model with a
Bayesian hypothesis test to quantitatively determine if, when, and precisely
how a change point has occurred. We analyze the detectability of our method
using synthetic data with known change points of different types and
magnitudes, and show that this method is more accurate than several previously
used alternatives. Applied to two high-resolution evolving social networks,
this method identifies a sequence of change points that align with known
external "shocks" to these networks
DancingLines: An Analytical Scheme to Depict Cross-Platform Event Popularity
Nowadays, events usually burst and are propagated online through multiple
modern media like social networks and search engines. There exists various
research discussing the event dissemination trends on individual medium, while
few studies focus on event popularity analysis from a cross-platform
perspective. Challenges come from the vast diversity of events and media,
limited access to aligned datasets across different media and a great deal of
noise in the datasets. In this paper, we design DancingLines, an innovative
scheme that captures and quantitatively analyzes event popularity between
pairwise text media. It contains two models: TF-SW, a semantic-aware popularity
quantification model, based on an integrated weight coefficient leveraging
Word2Vec and TextRank; and wDTW-CD, a pairwise event popularity time series
alignment model matching different event phases adapted from Dynamic Time
Warping. We also propose three metrics to interpret event popularity trends
between pairwise social platforms. Experimental results on eighteen real-world
event datasets from an influential social network and a popular search engine
validate the effectiveness and applicability of our scheme. DancingLines is
demonstrated to possess broad application potentials for discovering the
knowledge of various aspects related to events and different media
Intrinsically Dynamic Network Communities
Community finding algorithms for networks have recently been extended to
dynamic data. Most of these recent methods aim at exhibiting community
partitions from successive graph snapshots and thereafter connecting or
smoothing these partitions using clever time-dependent features and sampling
techniques. These approaches are nonetheless achieving longitudinal rather than
dynamic community detection. We assume that communities are fundamentally
defined by the repetition of interactions among a set of nodes over time.
According to this definition, analyzing the data by considering successive
snapshots induces a significant loss of information: we suggest that it blurs
essentially dynamic phenomena - such as communities based on repeated
inter-temporal interactions, nodes switching from a community to another across
time, or the possibility that a community survives while its members are being
integrally replaced over a longer time period. We propose a formalism which
aims at tackling this issue in the context of time-directed datasets (such as
citation networks), and present several illustrations on both empirical and
synthetic dynamic networks. We eventually introduce intrinsically dynamic
metrics to qualify temporal community structure and emphasize their possible
role as an estimator of the quality of the community detection - taking into
account the fact that various empirical contexts may call for distinct
`community' definitions and detection criteria.Comment: 27 pages, 11 figure
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