35,095 research outputs found
Information dynamics algorithm for detecting communities in networks
The problem of community detection is relevant in many scientific
disciplines, from social science to statistical physics. Given the impact of
community detection in many areas, such as psychology and social sciences, we
have addressed the issue of modifying existing well performing algorithms by
incorporating elements of the domain application fields, i.e. domain-inspired.
We have focused on a psychology and social network - inspired approach which
may be useful for further strengthening the link between social network studies
and mathematics of community detection. Here we introduce a community-detection
algorithm derived from the van Dongen's Markov Cluster algorithm (MCL) method
by considering networks' nodes as agents capable to take decisions. In this
framework we have introduced a memory factor to mimic a typical human behavior
such as the oblivion effect. The method is based on information diffusion and
it includes a non-linear processing phase. We test our method on two classical
community benchmark and on computer generated networks with known community
structure. Our approach has three important features: the capacity of detecting
overlapping communities, the capability of identifying communities from an
individual point of view and the fine tuning the community detectability with
respect to prior knowledge of the data. Finally we discuss how to use a Shannon
entropy measure for parameter estimation in complex networks.Comment: Submitted to "Communication in Nonlinear Science and Numerical
Simulation
Community structure in real-world networks from a non-parametrical synchronization-based dynamical approach
This work analyzes the problem of community structure in real-world networks
based on the synchronization of nonidentical coupled chaotic R\"{o}ssler
oscillators each one characterized by a defined natural frequency, and coupled
according to a predefined network topology. The interaction scheme contemplates
an uniformly increasing coupling force to simulate a society in which the
association between the agents grows in time. To enhance the stability of the
correlated states that could emerge from the synchronization process, we
propose a parameterless mechanism that adapts the characteristic frequencies of
coupled oscillators according to a dynamic connectivity matrix deduced from
correlated data. We show that the characteristic frequency vector that results
from the adaptation mechanism reveals the underlying community structure
present in the network.Comment: 21 pages, 7 figures; Chaos, Solitons & Fractals (2012
Identifying communities by influence dynamics in social networks
Communities are not static; they evolve, split and merge, appear and
disappear, i.e. they are product of dynamical processes that govern the
evolution of the network. A good algorithm for community detection should not
only quantify the topology of the network, but incorporate the dynamical
processes that take place on the network. We present a novel algorithm for
community detection that combines network structure with processes that support
creation and/or evolution of communities. The algorithm does not embrace the
universal approach but instead tries to focus on social networks and model
dynamic social interactions that occur on those networks. It identifies
leaders, and communities that form around those leaders. It naturally supports
overlapping communities by associating each node with a membership vector that
describes node's involvement in each community. This way, in addition to
overlapping communities, we can identify nodes that are good followers to their
leader, and also nodes with no clear community involvement that serve as a
proxy between several communities and are equally as important. We run the
algorithm for several real social networks which we believe represent a good
fraction of the wide body of social networks and discuss the results including
other possible applications.Comment: 10 pages, 6 figure
Bank-firm credit network in Japan. An analysis of a bipartite network
We present an analysis of the credit market of Japan. The analysis is
performed by investigating the bipartite network of banks and firms which is
obtained by setting a link between a bank and a firm when a credit relationship
is present in a given time window. In our investigation we focus on a community
detection algorithm which is identifying communities composed by both banks and
firms. We show that the clusters obtained by directly working on the bipartite
network carry information about the networked nature of the Japanese credit
market. Our analysis is performed for each calendar year during the time period
from 1980 to 2011. Specifically, we obtain communities of banks and networks
for each of the 32 investigated years, and we introduce a method to track the
time evolution of these communities on a statistical basis. We then
characterize communities by detecting the simultaneous over-expression of
attributes of firms and banks. Specifically, we consider as attributes the
economic sector and the geographical location of firms and the type of banks.
In our 32 year long analysis we detect a persistence of the over-expression of
attributes of clusters of banks and firms together with a slow dynamics of
changes from some specific attributes to new ones. Our empirical observations
show that the credit market in Japan is a networked market where the type of
banks, geographical location of firms and banks and economic sector of the firm
play a role in shaping the credit relationships between banks and firms.Comment: 9 pages, 4 figures, 2 Table
AUGUR: Forecasting the Emergence of New Research Topics
Being able to rapidly recognise new research trends is strategic for many stakeholders, including universities, institutional funding bodies, academic publishers and companies. The literature presents several approaches to identifying the emergence of new research topics, which rely on the assumption that the topic is already exhibiting a certain degree of popularity and consistently referred to by a community of researchers. However, detecting the emergence of a new research area at an embryonic stage, i.e., before the topic has been consistently labelled by a community of researchers and associated with a number of publications, is still an open challenge. We address this issue by introducing Augur, a novel approach to the early detection of research topics. Augur analyses the diachronic relationships between research areas and is able to detect clusters of topics that exhibit dynamics correlated with the emergence of new research topics. Here we also present the Advanced Clique Percolation Method (ACPM), a new community detection algorithm developed specifically for supporting this task. Augur was evaluated on a gold standard of 1,408 debutant topics in the 2000-2011 interval and outperformed four alternative approaches in terms of both precision and recall
Communities in Networks
We survey some of the concepts, methods, and applications of community
detection, which has become an increasingly important area of network science.
To help ease newcomers into the field, we provide a guide to available
methodology and open problems, and discuss why scientists from diverse
backgrounds are interested in these problems. As a running theme, we emphasize
the connections of community detection to problems in statistical physics and
computational optimization.Comment: survey/review article on community structure in networks; published
version is available at
http://people.maths.ox.ac.uk/~porterm/papers/comnotices.pd
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