28 research outputs found
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
Perfect Elimination Orderings for Symmetric Matrices
We introduce a new class of structured symmetric matrices by extending the
notion of perfect elimination ordering from graphs to weighted graphs or
matrices. This offers a common framework capturing common vertex elimination
orderings of monotone families of chordal graphs, Robinsonian matrices and
ultrametrics. We give a structural characterization for matrices that admit
perfect elimination orderings in terms of forbidden substructures generalizing
chordless cycles in graphs.Comment: 16 pages, 3 figure