38,713 research outputs found
Community detection algorithms: a comparative analysis
Uncovering the community structure exhibited by real networks is a crucial
step towards an understanding of complex systems that goes beyond the local
organization of their constituents. Many algorithms have been proposed so far,
but none of them has been subjected to strict tests to evaluate their
performance. Most of the sporadic tests performed so far involved small
networks with known community structure and/or artificial graphs with a
simplified structure, which is very uncommon in real systems. Here we test
several methods against a recently introduced class of benchmark graphs, with
heterogeneous distributions of degree and community size. The methods are also
tested against the benchmark by Girvan and Newman and on random graphs. As a
result of our analysis, three recent algorithms introduced by Rosvall and
Bergstrom, Blondel et al. and Ronhovde and Nussinov, respectively, have an
excellent performance, with the additional advantage of low computational
complexity, which enables one to analyze large systems.Comment: 12 pages, 8 figures. The software to compute the values of our
general normalized mutual information is available at
http://santo.fortunato.googlepages.com/inthepress
Networks and the epidemiology of infectious disease
The science of networks has revolutionised research into the dynamics of interacting elements. It could be argued that epidemiology in particular has embraced the potential of network theory more than any other discipline. Here we review the growing body of research concerning the spread of infectious diseases on networks, focusing on the interplay between network theory and epidemiology. The review is split into four main sections, which examine: the types of network relevant to epidemiology; the multitude of ways these networks can be characterised; the statistical methods that can be applied to infer the epidemiological parameters on a realised network; and finally simulation and analytical methods to determine epidemic dynamics on a given network. Given the breadth of areas covered and the ever-expanding number of publications, a comprehensive review of all work is impossible. Instead, we provide a personalised overview into the areas of network epidemiology that have seen the greatest progress in recent years or have the greatest potential to provide novel insights. As such, considerable importance is placed on analytical approaches and statistical methods which are both rapidly expanding fields. Throughout this review we restrict our attention to epidemiological issues
Benchmarks for testing community detection algorithms on directed and weighted graphs with overlapping communities
Many complex networks display a mesoscopic structure with groups of nodes
sharing many links with the other nodes in their group and comparatively few
with nodes of different groups. This feature is known as community structure
and encodes precious information about the organization and the function of the
nodes. Many algorithms have been proposed but it is not yet clear how they
should be tested. Recently we have proposed a general class of undirected and
unweighted benchmark graphs, with heterogenous distributions of node degree and
community size. An increasing attention has been recently devoted to develop
algorithms able to consider the direction and the weight of the links, which
require suitable benchmark graphs for testing. In this paper we extend the
basic ideas behind our previous benchmark to generate directed and weighted
networks with built-in community structure. We also consider the possibility
that nodes belong to more communities, a feature occurring in real systems,
like, e. g., social networks. As a practical application, we show how
modularity optimization performs on our new benchmark.Comment: 9 pages, 13 figures. Final version published in Physical Review E.
The code to create the benchmark graphs can be freely downloaded from
http://santo.fortunato.googlepages.com/inthepress
Ubiquitousness of link-density and link-pattern communities in real-world networks
Community structure appears to be an intrinsic property of many complex
real-world networks. However, recent work shows that real-world networks reveal
even more sophisticated modules than classical cohesive (link-density)
communities. In particular, networks can also be naturally partitioned
according to similar patterns of connectedness among the nodes, revealing
link-pattern communities. We here propose a propagation based algorithm that
can extract both link-density and link-pattern communities, without any prior
knowledge of the true structure. The algorithm was first validated on different
classes of synthetic benchmark networks with community structure, and also on
random networks. We have further applied the algorithm to different social,
information, technological and biological networks, where it indeed reveals
meaningful (composites of) link-density and link-pattern communities. The
results thus seem to imply that, similarly as link-density counterparts,
link-pattern communities appear ubiquitous in nature and design
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