25,046 research outputs found
The stability of a graph partition: A dynamics-based framework for community detection
Recent years have seen a surge of interest in the analysis of complex
networks, facilitated by the availability of relational data and the
increasingly powerful computational resources that can be employed for their
analysis. Naturally, the study of real-world systems leads to highly complex
networks and a current challenge is to extract intelligible, simplified
descriptions from the network in terms of relevant subgraphs, which can provide
insight into the structure and function of the overall system.
Sparked by seminal work by Newman and Girvan, an interesting line of research
has been devoted to investigating modular community structure in networks,
revitalising the classic problem of graph partitioning.
However, modular or community structure in networks has notoriously evaded
rigorous definition. The most accepted notion of community is perhaps that of a
group of elements which exhibit a stronger level of interaction within
themselves than with the elements outside the community. This concept has
resulted in a plethora of computational methods and heuristics for community
detection. Nevertheless a firm theoretical understanding of most of these
methods, in terms of how they operate and what they are supposed to detect, is
still lacking to date.
Here, we will develop a dynamical perspective towards community detection
enabling us to define a measure named the stability of a graph partition. It
will be shown that a number of previously ad-hoc defined heuristics for
community detection can be seen as particular cases of our method providing us
with a dynamic reinterpretation of those measures. Our dynamics-based approach
thus serves as a unifying framework to gain a deeper understanding of different
aspects and problems associated with community detection and allows us to
propose new dynamically-inspired criteria for community structure.Comment: 3 figures; published as book chapte
Absorbing Random Walks Interpolating Between Centrality Measures on Complex Networks
Centrality, which quantifies the "importance" of individual nodes, is among
the most essential concepts in modern network theory. As there are many ways in
which a node can be important, many different centrality measures are in use.
Here, we concentrate on versions of the common betweenness and it closeness
centralities. The former measures the fraction of paths between pairs of nodes
that go through a given node, while the latter measures an average inverse
distance between a particular node and all other nodes. Both centralities only
consider shortest paths (i.e., geodesics) between pairs of nodes. Here we
develop a method, based on absorbing Markov chains, that enables us to
continuously interpolate both of these centrality measures away from the
geodesic limit and toward a limit where no restriction is placed on the length
of the paths the walkers can explore. At this second limit, the interpolated
betweenness and closeness centralities reduce, respectively, to the well-known
it current betweenness and resistance closeness (information) centralities. The
method is tested numerically on four real networks, revealing complex changes
in node centrality rankings with respect to the value of the interpolation
parameter. Non-monotonic betweenness behaviors are found to characterize nodes
that lie close to inter-community boundaries in the studied networks
Recent Advances in Graph Partitioning
We survey recent trends in practical algorithms for balanced graph
partitioning together with applications and future research directions
Multi-scale analysis of the European airspace using network community detection
We show that the European airspace can be represented as a multi-scale
traffic network whose nodes are airports, sectors, or navigation points and
links are defined and weighted according to the traffic of flights between the
nodes. By using a unique database of the air traffic in the European airspace,
we investigate the architecture of these networks with a special emphasis on
their community structure. We propose that unsupervised network community
detection algorithms can be used to monitor the current use of the airspaces
and improve it by guiding the design of new ones. Specifically, we compare the
performance of three community detection algorithms, also by using a null model
which takes into account the spatial distance between nodes, and we discuss
their ability to find communities that could be used to define new control
units of the airspace.Comment: 22 pages, 14 figure
A General Framework for Complex Network Applications
Complex network theory has been applied to solving practical problems from
different domains. In this paper, we present a general framework for complex
network applications. The keys of a successful application are a thorough
understanding of the real system and a correct mapping of complex network
theory to practical problems in the system. Despite of certain limitations
discussed in this paper, complex network theory provides a foundation on which
to develop powerful tools in analyzing and optimizing large interconnected
systems.Comment: 8 page
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