59,550 research outputs found
Community Structure in the United States House of Representatives
We investigate the networks of committee and subcommittee assignments in the
United States House of Representatives from the 101st--108th Congresses, with
the committees connected by ``interlocks'' or common membership. We examine the
community structure in these networks using several methods, revealing strong
links between certain committees as well as an intrinsic hierarchical structure
in the House as a whole. We identify structural changes, including additional
hierarchical levels and higher modularity, resulting from the 1994 election, in
which the Republican party earned majority status in the House for the first
time in more than forty years. We also combine our network approach with
analysis of roll call votes using singular value decomposition to uncover
correlations between the political and organizational structure of House
committees.Comment: 44 pages, 13 figures (some with multiple parts and most in color), 9
tables, to appear in Physica A; new figures and revised discussion (including
extra introductory material) for this versio
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
Mining and Analyzing the Italian Parliament: Party Structure and Evolution
The roll calls of the Italian Parliament in the XVI legislature are studied
by employing multidimensional scaling, hierarchical clustering, and network
analysis. In order to detect changes in voting behavior, the roll calls have
been divided in seven periods of six months each. All the methods employed
pointed out an increasing fragmentation of the political parties endorsing the
previous government that culminated in its downfall. By using the concept of
modularity at different resolution levels, we identify the community structure
of Parliament and its evolution in each of the considered time periods. The
analysis performed revealed as a valuable tool in detecting trends and drifts
of Parliamentarians. It showed its effectiveness at identifying political
parties and at providing insights on the temporal evolution of groups and their
cohesiveness, without having at disposal any knowledge about political
membership of Representatives.Comment: 27 pages, 14 figure
Analysis of a networked social algorithm for collective selection of a committee of representatives
A recent work by Hern\'andez et al. introduced a networked voting rule
supported by a trust-based social network, where indications of possible
representatives were based on individuals opinions. Individual contributions
went beyond a simple vote-counting and were based on proxy voting. These
mechanisms generated a high level of representativeness of the selected
committee, weakening the possibility of relations of patronage. By
incorporating the integrity of individuals and its perception, here we address
the question of the trustability of the resulting committee. Our results show
that this voting rule provides high representativeness for small committees
with a high level of integrity. Furthermore, the voting system displays
robustness to a strategic and untruthful application of the voting algorithm.Comment: 7 pages and 8 figures. Submitted for publication. arXiv admin note:
text overlap with arXiv:1801.0539
Topological Data Analysis of Task-Based fMRI Data from Experiments on Schizophrenia
We use methods from computational algebraic topology to study functional
brain networks, in which nodes represent brain regions and weighted edges
encode the similarity of fMRI time series from each region. With these tools,
which allow one to characterize topological invariants such as loops in
high-dimensional data, we are able to gain understanding into low-dimensional
structures in networks in a way that complements traditional approaches that
are based on pairwise interactions. In the present paper, we use persistent
homology to analyze networks that we construct from task-based fMRI data from
schizophrenia patients, healthy controls, and healthy siblings of schizophrenia
patients. We thereby explore the persistence of topological structures such as
loops at different scales in these networks. We use persistence landscapes and
persistence images to create output summaries from our persistent-homology
calculations, and we study the persistence landscapes and images using
-means clustering and community detection. Based on our analysis of
persistence landscapes, we find that the members of the sibling cohort have
topological features (specifically, their 1-dimensional loops) that are
distinct from the other two cohorts. From the persistence images, we are able
to distinguish all three subject groups and to determine the brain regions in
the loops (with four or more edges) that allow us to make these distinctions
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An overview study of twitter in the UK local government
Copyright @ 2012 Brunel UniversityMicroblogging applications are becoming a momentous element of the public sector social media agenda. The potential of Twitter to update the public with frequent, concise and real-time content has motivated many pubic authorities to create their accounts, thus generating an interesting topic for research. This paper seeks to make an empirical and methodological contribution to this new body of knowledge by presenting an overview study of general Twitter accounts maintained by UK local government authorities. Over 296,000 tweets were collected from the 187officially listed local government accounts. The analysis was conducted in two stages: an examination of the Twitter networks developed by the accounts was followed by a structural analysis of the tweets. The combination of online research and social media analytics techniques enabled us to reach important conclusions about the use of Twitter by those authorities. The findings indicate high level of maturity of Twitter in the UK local government and point to several directions for further increasing the impact and visibility of those accounts within a social media strategy
Persistent homology of time-dependent functional networks constructed from coupled time series
We use topological data analysis to study "functional networks" that we
construct from time-series data from both experimental and synthetic sources.
We use persistent homology with a weight rank clique filtration to gain
insights into these functional networks, and we use persistence landscapes to
interpret our results. Our first example uses time-series output from networks
of coupled Kuramoto oscillators. Our second example consists of biological data
in the form of functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) data that was
acquired from human subjects during a simple motor-learning task in which
subjects were monitored on three days in a five-day period. With these
examples, we demonstrate that (1) using persistent homology to study functional
networks provides fascinating insights into their properties and (2) the
position of the features in a filtration can sometimes play a more vital role
than persistence in the interpretation of topological features, even though
conventionally the latter is used to distinguish between signal and noise. We
find that persistent homology can detect differences in synchronization
patterns in our data sets over time, giving insight both on changes in
community structure in the networks and on increased synchronization between
brain regions that form loops in a functional network during motor learning.
For the motor-learning data, persistence landscapes also reveal that on average
the majority of changes in the network loops take place on the second of the
three days of the learning process.Comment: 17 pages (+3 pages in Supplementary Information), 11 figures in many
text (many with multiple parts) + others in SI, submitte
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