Graph measures and network robustness

Network robustness research aims at finding a measure to quantify network robustness. Once such a measure has been established, we will be able to compare networks, to improve existing networks and to design new networks that are able to continue to perform well when it is subject to failures or attacks. In this paper we survey a large amount of robustness measures on simple, undirected and unweighted graphs, in order to offer a tool for network administrators to evaluate and improve the robustness of their network. The measures discussed in this paper are based on the concepts of connectivity (including reliability polynomials), distance, betweenness and clustering. Some other measures are notions from spectral graph theory, more precisely, they are functions of the Laplacian eigenvalues. In addition to surveying these graph measures, the paper also contains a discussion of their functionality as a measure for topological network robustness

Exploring Robustness of Neural Networks through Graph Measures

Motivated by graph theory, artificial neural networks (ANNs) are traditionally structured as layers of neurons (nodes), which learn useful information by the passage of data through interconnections (edges). In the machine learning realm, graph structures (i.e., neurons and connections) of ANNs have recently been explored using various graph-theoretic measures linked to their predictive performance. On the other hand, in network science (NetSci), certain graph measures including entropy and curvature are known to provide insight into the robustness and fragility of real-world networks. In this work, we use these graph measures to explore the robustness of various ANNs to adversarial attacks. To this end, we (1) explore the design space of inter-layer and intra-layers connectivity regimes of ANNs in the graph domain and record their predictive performance after training under different types of adversarial attacks, (2) use graph representations for both inter-layer and intra-layers connectivity regimes to calculate various graph-theoretic measures, including curvature and entropy, and (3) analyze the relationship between these graph measures and the adversarial performance of ANNs. We show that curvature and entropy, while operating in the graph domain, can quantify the robustness of ANNs without having to train these ANNs. Our results suggest that the real-world networks, including brain networks, financial networks, and social networks may provide important clues to the neural architecture search for robust ANNs. We propose a search strategy that efficiently finds robust ANNs amongst a set of well-performing ANNs without having a need to train all of these ANNs.Comment: 18 pages, 15 figure

Robustness in Nonorthogonal Multiple Access 5G Networks

The diversity of fifth generation (5G) network use cases, multiple access technologies, and network deployments requires measures of network robustness that complement throughput-centric error rates. In this paper, we investigate robustness in nonorthogonal multiple access (NOMA) 5G networks through temporal network theory. We develop a graph model and analytical framework to characterize time-varying network connectedness as a function of NOMA overloading. We extend our analysis to derive lower bounds and probability expressions for the number of medium access control frames required to achieve pairwise connectivity between all network devices. We support our analytical results through simulation

Characterizing Distances of Networks on the Tensor Manifold

At the core of understanding dynamical systems is the ability to maintain and control the systems behavior that includes notions of robustness, heterogeneity, or regime-shift detection. Recently, to explore such functional properties, a convenient representation has been to model such dynamical systems as a weighted graph consisting of a finite, but very large number of interacting agents. This said, there exists very limited relevant statistical theory that is able cope with real-life data, i.e., how does perform analysis and/or statistics over a family of networks as opposed to a specific network or network-to-network variation. Here, we are interested in the analysis of network families whereby each network represents a point on an underlying statistical manifold. To do so, we explore the Riemannian structure of the tensor manifold developed by Pennec previously applied to Diffusion Tensor Imaging (DTI) towards the problem of network analysis. In particular, while this note focuses on Pennec definition of geodesics amongst a family of networks, we show how it lays the foundation for future work for developing measures of network robustness for regime-shift detection. We conclude with experiments highlighting the proposed distance on synthetic networks and an application towards biological (stem-cell) systems.Comment: This paper is accepted at 8th International Conference on Complex Networks 201

Closeness centrality in some splitting networks

A central issue in the analysis of complex networks is the assessment of their robustness and vulnerability. A variety of measures have been proposed in the literature to quantify the robustness of networks, and a number of graph-theoretic parameters have been used to derive formulas for calculating network reliability. \textit{Centrality} parameters play an important role in the field of network analysis. Numerous studies have proposed and analyzed several \textit{centrality} measures. We consider \textit{closeness centrality} which is defined as the total graph-theoretic distance to all other vertices in the graph. In this paper, closeness centrality of some splitting graphs is calculated, and exact values are obtained

Graph-theoretical comparison of normal and tumor networks in identifying BRCA genes

Background: Identification of driver genes related to certain types of cancer is an important research topic. Several systems biology approaches have been suggested, in particular for the identification of breast cancer (BRCA) related genes. Such approaches usually rely on differential gene expression and/or mutational landscape data. In some cases interaction network data is also integrated to identify cancer-related modules computationally. Results: We provide a framework for the comparative graph-theoretical analysis of networks integrating the relevant gene expression, mutations, and potein-protein interaction network data. The comparisons involve a graph-theoretical analysis of normal and tumor network pairs across all instances of a given set of breast cancer samples. The network measures under consideration are based on appropriate formulations of various centrality measures: betweenness, clustering coefficients, degree centrality, random walk distances, graph-theoretical distances, and Jaccard index centrality. Conclusions: Among all the studied centrality-based graph-theoretical properties, we show that a betweenness-based measure differentiates BRCA genes across all normal versus tumor network pairs, than the rest of the popular centrality-based measures. The AUROC and AUPR values of the gene lists ordered with respect to the measures under study as compared to NCBI BioSystems pathway and the COSMIC database of cancer genes are the largest with the betweenness-based differentiation, followed by the measure based on degree centrality. In order to test the robustness of the suggested measures in prioritizing cancer genes, we further tested the two most promising measures, those based on betweenness and degree centralities, on randomly rewired networks. We show that both measures are quite resilient to noise in the input interaction network. We also compared the same measures against a state-of-the-art alternative disease gene prioritization method, UFFFINN. We show that both our graph-theoretical measures outperform MUFFINN prioritizations in terms of ROC and precions/recall analysis. Finally, we filter the ordered list of the best measure, the betweenness-based differentiation, via a maximum-weight independent set formulation and investigate the top 50 genes in regards to literature verification. We show that almost all genes in the list are verified by the breast cancer literature and three genes are presented as novel genes that may potentialy be BRCA-related but missing in literature.No sponso

Super edge-connectivity and matching preclusion of data center networks

Edge-connectivity is a classic measure for reliability of a network in the presence of edge failures. $k$-restricted edge-connectivity is one of the refined indicators for fault tolerance of large networks. Matching preclusion and conditional matching preclusion are two important measures for the robustness of networks in edge fault scenario. In this paper, we show that the DCell network $D_{k,n}$ is super-$\lambda$ for $k\geq2$ and $n\geq2$, super-$\lambda_2$ for $k\geq3$ and $n\geq2$, or $k=2$ and $n=2$, and super-$\lambda_3$ for $k\geq4$ and $n\geq3$. Moreover, as an application of $k$-restricted edge-connectivity, we study the matching preclusion number and conditional matching preclusion number, and characterize the corresponding optimal solutions of $D_{k,n}$. In particular, we have shown that $D_{1,n}$ is isomorphic to the $(n,k)$-star graph $S_{n+1,2}$ for $n\geq2$.Comment: 20 pages, 1 figur