69,913 research outputs found
Centrality Measures for Networks with Community Structure
Understanding the network structure, and finding out the influential nodes is
a challenging issue in the large networks. Identifying the most influential
nodes in the network can be useful in many applications like immunization of
nodes in case of epidemic spreading, during intentional attacks on complex
networks. A lot of research is done to devise centrality measures which could
efficiently identify the most influential nodes in the network. There are two
major approaches to the problem: On one hand, deterministic strategies that
exploit knowledge about the overall network topology in order to find the
influential nodes, while on the other end, random strategies are completely
agnostic about the network structure. Centrality measures that can deal with a
limited knowledge of the network structure are required. Indeed, in practice,
information about the global structure of the overall network is rarely
available or hard to acquire. Even if available, the structure of the network
might be too large that it is too much computationally expensive to calculate
global centrality measures. To that end, a centrality measure is proposed that
requires information only at the community level to identify the influential
nodes in the network. Indeed, most of the real-world networks exhibit a
community structure that can be exploited efficiently to discover the
influential nodes. We performed a comparative evaluation of prominent global
deterministic strategies together with stochastic strategies with an available
and the proposed deterministic community-based strategy. Effectiveness of the
proposed method is evaluated by performing experiments on synthetic and
real-world networks with community structure in the case of immunization of
nodes for epidemic control.Comment: 30 pages, 4 figures. Accepted for publication in Physica A. arXiv
admin note: text overlap with arXiv:1411.627
Community-based Immunization Strategies for Epidemic Control
Understanding the epidemic dynamics, and finding out efficient techniques to
control it, is a challenging issue. A lot of research has been done on targeted
immunization strategies, exploiting various global network topological
properties. However, in practice, information about the global structure of the
contact network may not be available. Therefore, immunization strategies that
can deal with a limited knowledge of the network structure are required. In
this paper, we propose targeted immunization strategies that require
information only at the community level. Results of our investigations on the
SIR epidemiological model, using a realistic synthetic benchmark with
controlled community structure, show that the community structure plays an
important role in the epidemic dynamics. An extensive comparative evaluation
demonstrates that the proposed strategies are as efficient as the most
influential global centrality based immunization strategies, despite the fact
that they use a limited amount of information. Furthermore, they outperform
alternative local strategies, which are agnostic about the network structure,
and make decisions based on random walks.Comment: 6 pages, 7 figure
Optimal modularity and memory capacity of neural reservoirs
The neural network is a powerful computing framework that has been exploited
by biological evolution and by humans for solving diverse problems. Although
the computational capabilities of neural networks are determined by their
structure, the current understanding of the relationships between a neural
network's architecture and function is still primitive. Here we reveal that
neural network's modular architecture plays a vital role in determining the
neural dynamics and memory performance of the network of threshold neurons. In
particular, we demonstrate that there exists an optimal modularity for memory
performance, where a balance between local cohesion and global connectivity is
established, allowing optimally modular networks to remember longer. Our
results suggest that insights from dynamical analysis of neural networks and
information spreading processes can be leveraged to better design neural
networks and may shed light on the brain's modular organization
Data on face-to-face contacts in an office building suggests a low-cost vaccination strategy based on community linkers
Empirical data on contacts between individuals in social contexts play an
important role in providing information for models describing human behavior
and how epidemics spread in populations. Here, we analyze data on face-to-face
contacts collected in an office building. The statistical properties of
contacts are similar to other social situations, but important differences are
observed in the contact network structure. In particular, the contact network
is strongly shaped by the organization of the offices in departments, which has
consequences in the design of accurate agent-based models of epidemic spread.
We consider the contact network as a potential substrate for infectious disease
spread and show that its sparsity tends to prevent outbreaks of rapidly
spreading epidemics. Moreover, we define three typical behaviors according to
the fraction of links each individual shares outside its own department:
residents, wanderers and linkers. Linkers () act as bridges in the
network and have large betweenness centralities. Thus, a vaccination strategy
targeting linkers efficiently prevents large outbreaks. As such a behavior may
be spotted a priori in the offices' organization or from surveys, without the
full knowledge of the time-resolved contact network, this result may help the
design of efficient, low-cost vaccination or social-distancing strategies
The reachability of contagion in temporal contact networks: how disease latency can exploit the rhythm of human behavior
The symptoms of many infectious diseases influence their host to withdraw
from social activity limiting their own potential to spread. Successful
transmission therefore requires the onset of infectiousness to coincide with a
time when its host is socially active. Since social activity and infectiousness
are both temporal phenomena, we hypothesize that diseases are most pervasive
when these two processes are synchronized. We consider disease dynamics that
incorporate a behavioral response that effectively shortens the infectious
period of the disease. We apply this model to data collected from face-to-face
social interactions and look specifically at how the duration of the latent
period effects the reachability of the disease. We then simulate the spread of
the model disease on the network to test the robustness of our results.
Diseases with latent periods that synchronize with the temporal social behavior
of people, i.e. latent periods of 24 hours or 7 days, correspond to peaks in
the number of individuals who are potentially at risk of becoming infected. The
effect of this synchronization is present for a range of disease models with
realistic parameters. The relationship between the latent period of an
infectious disease and its pervasiveness is non-linear and depends strongly on
the social context in which the disease is spreading.Comment: 9 Pages, 5 figure
Reconstructing propagation networks with natural diversity and identifying hidden sources
Our ability to uncover complex network structure and dynamics from data is
fundamental to understanding and controlling collective dynamics in complex
systems. Despite recent progress in this area, reconstructing networks with
stochastic dynamical processes from limited time series remains to be an
outstanding problem. Here we develop a framework based on compressed sensing to
reconstruct complex networks on which stochastic spreading dynamics take place.
We apply the methodology to a large number of model and real networks, finding
that a full reconstruction of inhomogeneous interactions can be achieved from
small amounts of polarized (binary) data, a virtue of compressed sensing.
Further, we demonstrate that a hidden source that triggers the spreading
process but is externally inaccessible can be ascertained and located with high
confidence in the absence of direct routes of propagation from it. Our approach
thus establishes a paradigm for tracing and controlling epidemic invasion and
information diffusion in complex networked systems.Comment: 20 pages and 5 figures. For Supplementary information, please see
http://www.nature.com/ncomms/2014/140711/ncomms5323/full/ncomms5323.html#
Why Information Matters: A Foundation for Resilience
Embracing Change: The Critical Role of Information, a research project by the Internews' Center for Innovation & Learning, supported by the Rockefeller Foundation, combines Internews' longstanding effort to highlight the important role ofinformation with Rockefeller's groundbreaking work on resilience. The project focuses on three major aspects:- Building knowledge around the role of information in empowering communities to understand and adapt to different types of change: slow onset, long-term, and rapid onset / disruptive;- Identifying strategies and techniques for strengthening information ecosystems to support behavioral adaptation to disruptive change; and- Disseminating knowledge and principles to individuals, communities, the private sector, policymakers, and other partners so that they can incorporate healthy information ecosystems as a core element of their social resilience strategies
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