869 research outputs found
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
The Physics of Communicability in Complex Networks
A fundamental problem in the study of complex networks is to provide
quantitative measures of correlation and information flow between different
parts of a system. To this end, several notions of communicability have been
introduced and applied to a wide variety of real-world networks in recent
years. Several such communicability functions are reviewed in this paper. It is
emphasized that communication and correlation in networks can take place
through many more routes than the shortest paths, a fact that may not have been
sufficiently appreciated in previously proposed correlation measures. In
contrast to these, the communicability measures reviewed in this paper are
defined by taking into account all possible routes between two nodes, assigning
smaller weights to longer ones. This point of view naturally leads to the
definition of communicability in terms of matrix functions, such as the
exponential, resolvent, and hyperbolic functions, in which the matrix argument
is either the adjacency matrix or the graph Laplacian associated with the
network. Considerable insight on communicability can be gained by modeling a
network as a system of oscillators and deriving physical interpretations, both
classical and quantum-mechanical, of various communicability functions.
Applications of communicability measures to the analysis of complex systems are
illustrated on a variety of biological, physical and social networks. The last
part of the paper is devoted to a review of the notion of locality in complex
networks and to computational aspects that by exploiting sparsity can greatly
reduce the computational efforts for the calculation of communicability
functions for large networks.Comment: Review Article. 90 pages, 14 figures. Contents: Introduction;
Communicability in Networks; Physical Analogies; Comparing Communicability
Functions; Communicability and the Analysis of Networks; Communicability and
Localization in Complex Networks; Computability of Communicability Functions;
Conclusions and Prespective
Community detection for correlation matrices
A challenging problem in the study of complex systems is that of resolving,
without prior information, the emergent, mesoscopic organization determined by
groups of units whose dynamical activity is more strongly correlated internally
than with the rest of the system. The existing techniques to filter
correlations are not explicitly oriented towards identifying such modules and
can suffer from an unavoidable information loss. A promising alternative is
that of employing community detection techniques developed in network theory.
Unfortunately, this approach has focused predominantly on replacing network
data with correlation matrices, a procedure that tends to be intrinsically
biased due to its inconsistency with the null hypotheses underlying the
existing algorithms. Here we introduce, via a consistent redefinition of null
models based on random matrix theory, the appropriate correlation-based
counterparts of the most popular community detection techniques. Our methods
can filter out both unit-specific noise and system-wide dependencies, and the
resulting communities are internally correlated and mutually anti-correlated.
We also implement multiresolution and multifrequency approaches revealing
hierarchically nested sub-communities with `hard' cores and `soft' peripheries.
We apply our techniques to several financial time series and identify
mesoscopic groups of stocks which are irreducible to a standard, sectorial
taxonomy, detect `soft stocks' that alternate between communities, and discuss
implications for portfolio optimization and risk management.Comment: Final version, accepted for publication on PR
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