83,322 research outputs found
A Faster Method to Estimate Closeness Centrality Ranking
Closeness centrality is one way of measuring how central a node is in the
given network. The closeness centrality measure assigns a centrality value to
each node based on its accessibility to the whole network. In real life
applications, we are mainly interested in ranking nodes based on their
centrality values. The classical method to compute the rank of a node first
computes the closeness centrality of all nodes and then compares them to get
its rank. Its time complexity is , where represents total
number of nodes, and represents total number of edges in the network. In
the present work, we propose a heuristic method to fast estimate the closeness
rank of a node in time complexity, where . We
also propose an extended improved method using uniform sampling technique. This
method better estimates the rank and it has the time complexity , where . This is an excellent improvement over the
classical centrality ranking method. The efficiency of the proposed methods is
verified on real world scale-free social networks using absolute and weighted
error functions
Predicting links in ego-networks using temporal information
Link prediction appears as a central problem of network science, as it calls
for unfolding the mechanisms that govern the micro-dynamics of the network. In
this work, we are interested in ego-networks, that is the mere information of
interactions of a node to its neighbors, in the context of social
relationships. As the structural information is very poor, we rely on another
source of information to predict links among egos' neighbors: the timing of
interactions. We define several features to capture different kinds of temporal
information and apply machine learning methods to combine these various
features and improve the quality of the prediction. We demonstrate the
efficiency of this temporal approach on a cellphone interaction dataset,
pointing out features which prove themselves to perform well in this context,
in particular the temporal profile of interactions and elapsed time between
contacts.Comment: submitted to EPJ Data Scienc
Probing Limits of Information Spread with Sequential Seeding
We consider here information spread which propagates with certain probability
from nodes just activated to their not yet activated neighbors. Diffusion
cascades can be triggered by activation of even a small set of nodes. Such
activation is commonly performed in a single stage. A novel approach based on
sequential seeding is analyzed here resulting in three fundamental
contributions. First, we propose a coordinated execution of randomized choices
to enable precise comparison of different algorithms in general. We apply it
here when the newly activated nodes at each stage of spreading attempt to
activate their neighbors. Then, we present a formal proof that sequential
seeding delivers at least as large coverage as the single stage seeding does.
Moreover, we also show that, under modest assumptions, sequential seeding
achieves coverage provably better than the single stage based approach using
the same number of seeds and node ranking. Finally, we present experimental
results showing how single stage and sequential approaches on directed and
undirected graphs compare to the well-known greedy approach to provide the
objective measure of the sequential seeding benefits. Surprisingly, applying
sequential seeding to a simple degree-based selection leads to higher coverage
than achieved by the computationally expensive greedy approach currently
considered to be the best heuristic
DeepInf: Social Influence Prediction with Deep Learning
Social and information networking activities such as on Facebook, Twitter,
WeChat, and Weibo have become an indispensable part of our everyday life, where
we can easily access friends' behaviors and are in turn influenced by them.
Consequently, an effective social influence prediction for each user is
critical for a variety of applications such as online recommendation and
advertising.
Conventional social influence prediction approaches typically design various
hand-crafted rules to extract user- and network-specific features. However,
their effectiveness heavily relies on the knowledge of domain experts. As a
result, it is usually difficult to generalize them into different domains.
Inspired by the recent success of deep neural networks in a wide range of
computing applications, we design an end-to-end framework, DeepInf, to learn
users' latent feature representation for predicting social influence. In
general, DeepInf takes a user's local network as the input to a graph neural
network for learning her latent social representation. We design strategies to
incorporate both network structures and user-specific features into
convolutional neural and attention networks. Extensive experiments on Open
Academic Graph, Twitter, Weibo, and Digg, representing different types of
social and information networks, demonstrate that the proposed end-to-end
model, DeepInf, significantly outperforms traditional feature engineering-based
approaches, suggesting the effectiveness of representation learning for social
applications.Comment: 10 pages, 5 figures, to appear in KDD 2018 proceeding
Network-based ranking in social systems: three challenges
Ranking algorithms are pervasive in our increasingly digitized societies,
with important real-world applications including recommender systems, search
engines, and influencer marketing practices. From a network science
perspective, network-based ranking algorithms solve fundamental problems
related to the identification of vital nodes for the stability and dynamics of
a complex system. Despite the ubiquitous and successful applications of these
algorithms, we argue that our understanding of their performance and their
applications to real-world problems face three fundamental challenges: (i)
Rankings might be biased by various factors; (2) their effectiveness might be
limited to specific problems; and (3) agents' decisions driven by rankings
might result in potentially vicious feedback mechanisms and unhealthy systemic
consequences. Methods rooted in network science and agent-based modeling can
help us to understand and overcome these challenges.Comment: Perspective article. 9 pages, 3 figure
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