54,802 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
Considerations about multistep community detection
The problem and implications of community detection in networks have raised a
huge attention, for its important applications in both natural and social
sciences. A number of algorithms has been developed to solve this problem,
addressing either speed optimization or the quality of the partitions
calculated. In this paper we propose a multi-step procedure bridging the
fastest, but less accurate algorithms (coarse clustering), with the slowest,
most effective ones (refinement). By adopting heuristic ranking of the nodes,
and classifying a fraction of them as `critical', a refinement step can be
restricted to this subset of the network, thus saving computational time.
Preliminary numerical results are discussed, showing improvement of the final
partition.Comment: 12 page
Stability of graph communities across time scales
The complexity of biological, social and engineering networks makes it
desirable to find natural partitions into communities that can act as
simplified descriptions and provide insight into the structure and function of
the overall system. Although community detection methods abound, there is a
lack of consensus on how to quantify and rank the quality of partitions. We
show here that the quality of a partition can be measured in terms of its
stability, defined in terms of the clustered autocovariance of a Markov process
taking place on the graph. Because the stability has an intrinsic dependence on
time scales of the graph, it allows us to compare and rank partitions at each
time and also to establish the time spans over which partitions are optimal.
Hence the Markov time acts effectively as an intrinsic resolution parameter
that establishes a hierarchy of increasingly coarser clusterings. Within our
framework we can then provide a unifying view of several standard partitioning
measures: modularity and normalized cut size can be interpreted as one-step
time measures, whereas Fiedler's spectral clustering emerges at long times. We
apply our method to characterize the relevance and persistence of partitions
over time for constructive and real networks, including hierarchical graphs and
social networks. We also obtain reduced descriptions for atomic level protein
structures over different time scales.Comment: submitted; updated bibliography from v
Preserving Link Privacy in Social Network Based Systems
A growing body of research leverages social network based trust relationships
to improve the functionality of the system. However, these systems expose
users' trust relationships, which is considered sensitive information in
today's society, to an adversary.
In this work, we make the following contributions. First, we propose an
algorithm that perturbs the structure of a social graph in order to provide
link privacy, at the cost of slight reduction in the utility of the social
graph. Second we define general metrics for characterizing the utility and
privacy of perturbed graphs. Third, we evaluate the utility and privacy of our
proposed algorithm using real world social graphs. Finally, we demonstrate the
applicability of our perturbation algorithm on a broad range of secure systems,
including Sybil defenses and secure routing.Comment: 16 pages, 15 figure
Algorithmic and Statistical Perspectives on Large-Scale Data Analysis
In recent years, ideas from statistics and scientific computing have begun to
interact in increasingly sophisticated and fruitful ways with ideas from
computer science and the theory of algorithms to aid in the development of
improved worst-case algorithms that are useful for large-scale scientific and
Internet data analysis problems. In this chapter, I will describe two recent
examples---one having to do with selecting good columns or features from a (DNA
Single Nucleotide Polymorphism) data matrix, and the other having to do with
selecting good clusters or communities from a data graph (representing a social
or information network)---that drew on ideas from both areas and that may serve
as a model for exploiting complementary algorithmic and statistical
perspectives in order to solve applied large-scale data analysis problems.Comment: 33 pages. To appear in Uwe Naumann and Olaf Schenk, editors,
"Combinatorial Scientific Computing," Chapman and Hall/CRC Press, 201
A similarity-based community detection method with multiple prototype representation
Communities are of great importance for understanding graph structures in
social networks. Some existing community detection algorithms use a single
prototype to represent each group. In real applications, this may not
adequately model the different types of communities and hence limits the
clustering performance on social networks. To address this problem, a
Similarity-based Multi-Prototype (SMP) community detection approach is proposed
in this paper. In SMP, vertices in each community carry various weights to
describe their degree of representativeness. This mechanism enables each
community to be represented by more than one node. The centrality of nodes is
used to calculate prototype weights, while similarity is utilized to guide us
to partitioning the graph. Experimental results on computer generated and
real-world networks clearly show that SMP performs well for detecting
communities. Moreover, the method could provide richer information for the
inner structure of the detected communities with the help of prototype weights
compared with the existing community detection models
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