10,577 research outputs found
Communities in Networks
We survey some of the concepts, methods, and applications of community
detection, which has become an increasingly important area of network science.
To help ease newcomers into the field, we provide a guide to available
methodology and open problems, and discuss why scientists from diverse
backgrounds are interested in these problems. As a running theme, we emphasize
the connections of community detection to problems in statistical physics and
computational optimization.Comment: survey/review article on community structure in networks; published
version is available at
http://people.maths.ox.ac.uk/~porterm/papers/comnotices.pd
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
Detecting communities of triangles in complex networks using spectral optimization
The study of the sub-structure of complex networks is of major importance to
relate topology and functionality. Many efforts have been devoted to the
analysis of the modular structure of networks using the quality function known
as modularity. However, generally speaking, the relation between topological
modules and functional groups is still unknown, and depends on the semantic of
the links. Sometimes, we know in advance that many connections are transitive
and, as a consequence, triangles have a specific meaning. Here we propose the
study of the modular structure of networks considering triangles as the
building blocks of modules. The method generalizes the standard modularity and
uses spectral optimization to find its maximum. We compare the partitions
obtained with those resulting from the optimization of the standard modularity
in several real networks. The results show that the information reported by the
analysis of modules of triangles complements the information of the classical
modularity analysis.Comment: Computer Communications (in press
A similarity-based community detection method with multiple prototype representation
Communities are of great importance for understanding graph structures in
social networks. Some existing community detection algorithms use a single
prototype to represent each group. In real applications, this may not
adequately model the different types of communities and hence limits the
clustering performance on social networks. To address this problem, a
Similarity-based Multi-Prototype (SMP) community detection approach is proposed
in this paper. In SMP, vertices in each community carry various weights to
describe their degree of representativeness. This mechanism enables each
community to be represented by more than one node. The centrality of nodes is
used to calculate prototype weights, while similarity is utilized to guide us
to partitioning the graph. Experimental results on computer generated and
real-world networks clearly show that SMP performs well for detecting
communities. Moreover, the method could provide richer information for the
inner structure of the detected communities with the help of prototype weights
compared with the existing community detection models
Mesoscopic Community Structure of Financial Markets Revealed by Price and Sign Fluctuations
The mesoscopic organization of complex systems, from financial markets to the
brain, is an intermediate between the microscopic dynamics of individual units
(stocks or neurons, in the mentioned cases), and the macroscopic dynamics of
the system as a whole. The organization is determined by "communities" of units
whose dynamics, represented by time series of activity, is more strongly
correlated internally than with the rest of the system. Recent studies have
shown that the binary projections of various financial and neural time series
exhibit nontrivial dynamical features that resemble those of the original data.
This implies that a significant piece of information is encoded into the binary
projection (i.e. the sign) of such increments. Here, we explore whether the
binary signatures of multiple time series can replicate the same complex
community organization of the financial market, as the original weighted time
series. We adopt a method that has been specifically designed to detect
communities from cross-correlation matrices of time series data. Our analysis
shows that the simpler binary representation leads to a community structure
that is almost identical with that obtained using the full weighted
representation. These results confirm that binary projections of financial time
series contain significant structural information.Comment: 15 pages, 7 figure
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