3,574 research outputs found
Reciprocity in Social Networks with Capacity Constraints
Directed links -- representing asymmetric social ties or interactions (e.g.,
"follower-followee") -- arise naturally in many social networks and other
complex networks, giving rise to directed graphs (or digraphs) as basic
topological models for these networks. Reciprocity, defined for a digraph as
the percentage of edges with a reciprocal edge, is a key metric that has been
used in the literature to compare different directed networks and provide
"hints" about their structural properties: for example, are reciprocal edges
generated randomly by chance or are there other processes driving their
generation? In this paper we study the problem of maximizing achievable
reciprocity for an ensemble of digraphs with the same prescribed in- and
out-degree sequences. We show that the maximum reciprocity hinges crucially on
the in- and out-degree sequences, which may be intuitively interpreted as
constraints on some "social capacities" of nodes and impose fundamental limits
on achievable reciprocity. We show that it is NP-complete to decide the
achievability of a simple upper bound on maximum reciprocity, and provide
conditions for achieving it. We demonstrate that many real networks exhibit
reciprocities surprisingly close to the upper bound, which implies that users
in these social networks are in a sense more "social" than suggested by the
empirical reciprocity alone in that they are more willing to reciprocate,
subject to their "social capacity" constraints. We find some surprising linear
relationships between empirical reciprocity and the bound. We also show that a
particular type of small network motifs that we call 3-paths are the major
source of loss in reciprocity for real networks
Hamilton decompositions of regular expanders: applications
In a recent paper, we showed that every sufficiently large regular digraph G
on n vertices whose degree is linear in n and which is a robust outexpander has
a decomposition into edge-disjoint Hamilton cycles. The main consequence of
this theorem is that every regular tournament on n vertices can be decomposed
into (n-1)/2 edge-disjoint Hamilton cycles, whenever n is sufficiently large.
This verified a conjecture of Kelly from 1968. In this paper, we derive a
number of further consequences of our result on robust outexpanders, the main
ones are the following: (i) an undirected analogue of our result on robust
outexpanders; (ii) best possible bounds on the size of an optimal packing of
edge-disjoint Hamilton cycles in a graph of minimum degree d for a large range
of values for d. (iii) a similar result for digraphs of given minimum
semidegree; (iv) an approximate version of a conjecture of Nash-Williams on
Hamilton decompositions of dense regular graphs; (v) the observation that dense
quasi-random graphs are robust outexpanders; (vi) a verification of the `very
dense' case of a conjecture of Frieze and Krivelevich on packing edge-disjoint
Hamilton cycles in random graphs; (vii) a proof of a conjecture of Erdos on the
size of an optimal packing of edge-disjoint Hamilton cycles in a random
tournament.Comment: final version, to appear in J. Combinatorial Theory
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