Universal graphs with forbidden subgraphs and algebraic closure

We apply model theoretic methods to the problem of existence of countable universal graphs with finitely many forbidden connected subgraphs. We show that to a large extent the question reduces to one of local finiteness of an associated''algebraic closure'' operator. The main applications are new examples of universal graphs with forbidden subgraphs and simplified treatments of some previously known cases

Exact sampling of graphs with prescribed degree correlations

Many real-world networks exhibit correlations between the node degrees. For instance, in social networks nodes tend to connect to nodes of similar degree and conversely, in biological and technological networks, high-degree nodes tend to be linked with low-degree nodes. Degree correlations also affect the dynamics of processes supported by a network structure, such as the spread of opinions or epidemics. The proper modelling of these systems, i.e., without uncontrolled biases, requires the sampling of networks with a specified set of constraints. We present a solution to the sampling problem when the constraints imposed are the degree correlations. In particular, we develop an exact method to construct and sample graphs with a specified joint-degree matrix, which is a matrix providing the number of edges between all the sets of nodes of a given degree, for all degrees, thus completely specifying all pairwise degree correlations, and additionally, the degree sequence itself. Our algorithm always produces independent samples without backtracking. The complexity of the graph construction algorithm is ${\mathcal{O}}({NM})$ where N is the number of nodes and M is the number of edges