27,869 research outputs found
Collective Influence of Multiple Spreaders Evaluated by Tracing Real Information Flow in Large-Scale Social Networks
Identifying the most influential spreaders that maximize information flow is
a central question in network theory. Recently, a scalable method called
"Collective Influence (CI)" has been put forward through collective influence
maximization. In contrast to heuristic methods evaluating nodes' significance
separately, CI method inspects the collective influence of multiple spreaders.
Despite that CI applies to the influence maximization problem in percolation
model, it is still important to examine its efficacy in realistic information
spreading. Here, we examine real-world information flow in various social and
scientific platforms including American Physical Society, Facebook, Twitter and
LiveJournal. Since empirical data cannot be directly mapped to ideal
multi-source spreading, we leverage the behavioral patterns of users extracted
from data to construct "virtual" information spreading processes. Our results
demonstrate that the set of spreaders selected by CI can induce larger scale of
information propagation. Moreover, local measures as the number of connections
or citations are not necessarily the deterministic factors of nodes' importance
in realistic information spreading. This result has significance for rankings
scientists in scientific networks like the APS, where the commonly used number
of citations can be a poor indicator of the collective influence of authors in
the community.Comment: 11 pages, 4 figure
Clustering and Community Detection in Directed Networks: A Survey
Networks (or graphs) appear as dominant structures in diverse domains,
including sociology, biology, neuroscience and computer science. In most of the
aforementioned cases graphs are directed - in the sense that there is
directionality on the edges, making the semantics of the edges non symmetric.
An interesting feature that real networks present is the clustering or
community structure property, under which the graph topology is organized into
modules commonly called communities or clusters. The essence here is that nodes
of the same community are highly similar while on the contrary, nodes across
communities present low similarity. Revealing the underlying community
structure of directed complex networks has become a crucial and
interdisciplinary topic with a plethora of applications. Therefore, naturally
there is a recent wealth of research production in the area of mining directed
graphs - with clustering being the primary method and tool for community
detection and evaluation. The goal of this paper is to offer an in-depth review
of the methods presented so far for clustering directed networks along with the
relevant necessary methodological background and also related applications. The
survey commences by offering a concise review of the fundamental concepts and
methodological base on which graph clustering algorithms capitalize on. Then we
present the relevant work along two orthogonal classifications. The first one
is mostly concerned with the methodological principles of the clustering
algorithms, while the second one approaches the methods from the viewpoint
regarding the properties of a good cluster in a directed network. Further, we
present methods and metrics for evaluating graph clustering results,
demonstrate interesting application domains and provide promising future
research directions.Comment: 86 pages, 17 figures. Physics Reports Journal (To Appear
Large-Scale Distributed Internet-based Discovery Mechanism for Dynamic Spectrum Allocation
Scarcity of frequencies and the demand for more bandwidth is likely to
increase the need for devices that utilize the available frequencies more
efficiently. Radios must be able to dynamically find other users of the
frequency bands and adapt so that they are not interfered, even if they use
different radio protocols. As transmitters far away may cause as much
interference as a transmitter located nearby, this mechanism can not be based
on location alone. Central databases can be used for this purpose, but require
expensive infrastructure and planning to scale. In this paper, we propose a
decentralized protocol and architecture for discovering radio devices over the
Internet. The protocol has low resource requirements, making it suitable for
implementation on limited platforms. We evaluate the protocol through
simulation in network topologies with up to 2.3 million nodes, including
topologies generated from population patterns in Norway. The protocol has also
been implemented as proof-of-concept in real Wi-Fi routers.Comment: Accepted for publication at IEEE DySPAN 201
Detecting Strong Ties Using Network Motifs
Detecting strong ties among users in social and information networks is a
fundamental operation that can improve performance on a multitude of
personalization and ranking tasks. Strong-tie edges are often readily obtained
from the social network as users often participate in multiple overlapping
networks via features such as following and messaging. These networks may vary
greatly in size, density and the information they carry. This setting leads to
a natural strong tie detection task: given a small set of labeled strong tie
edges, how well can one detect unlabeled strong ties in the remainder of the
network?
This task becomes particularly daunting for the Twitter network due to scant
availability of pairwise relationship attribute data, and sparsity of strong
tie networks such as phone contacts. Given these challenges, a natural approach
is to instead use structural network features for the task, produced by {\em
combining} the strong and "weak" edges. In this work, we demonstrate via
experiments on Twitter data that using only such structural network features is
sufficient for detecting strong ties with high precision. These structural
network features are obtained from the presence and frequency of small network
motifs on combined strong and weak ties. We observe that using motifs larger
than triads alleviate sparsity problems that arise for smaller motifs, both due
to increased combinatorial possibilities as well as benefiting strongly from
searching beyond the ego network. Empirically, we observe that not all motifs
are equally useful, and need to be carefully constructed from the combined
edges in order to be effective for strong tie detection. Finally, we reinforce
our experimental findings with providing theoretical justification that
suggests why incorporating these larger sized motifs as features could lead to
increased performance in planted graph models.Comment: To appear in Proceedings of WWW 2017 (Web-science track
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