No Arabic abstract
Complex networks are nowadays employed in several applications. Modeling urban street networks is one of them, and in particular to analyze criminal aspects of a city. Several research groups have focused on such application, but until now, there is a lack of a well-defined methodology for employing complex networks in a whole crime analysis process, i.e. from data preparation to a deep analysis of criminal communities. Furthermore, the toolset available for those works is not complete enough, also lacking techniques to maintain up-to-date, complete crime datasets and proper assessment measures. In this sense, we propose a threefold methodology for employing complex networks in the detection of highly criminal areas within a city. Our methodology comprises three tasks: (i) Mapping of Urban Crimes; (ii) Criminal Community Identification; and (iii) Crime Analysis. Moreover, it provides a proper set of assessment measures for analyzing intrinsic criminality of communities, especially when considering different crime types. We show our methodology by applying it to a real crime dataset from the city of San Francisco - CA, USA. The results confirm its effectiveness to identify and analyze high criminality areas within a city. Hence, our contributions provide a basis for further developments on complex networks applied to crime analysis.
Online social networks represent a popular and diverse class of social media systems. Despite this variety, each of these systems undergoes a general process of online social network assembly, which represents the complicated and heterogeneous changes that transform newly born systems into mature platforms. However, little is known about this process. For example, how much of a networks assembly is driven by simple growth? How does a networks structure change as it matures? How does network structure vary with adoption rates and user heterogeneity, and do these properties play different roles at different points in the assembly? We investigate these and other questions using a unique dataset of online connections among the roughly one million users at the first 100 colleges admitted to Facebook, captured just 20 months after its launch. We first show that different vintages and adoption rates across this population of networks reveal temporal dynamics of the assembly process, and that assembly is only loosely related to network growth. We then exploit natural experiments embedded in this dataset and complementary data obtained via Internet archaeology to show that different subnetworks matured at different rates toward similar end states. These results shed light on the processes and patterns of online social network assembly, and may facilitate more effective design for online social systems.
Urban income segregation is a widespread phenomenon that challenges societies across the globe. Classical studies on segregation have largely focused on the geographic distribution of residential neighborhoods rather than on patterns of social behaviors and interactions. In this study, we analyze segregation in economic and social interactions by observing credit card transactions and Twitter mentions among thousands of individuals in three culturally different metropolitan areas. We show that segregated interaction is amplified relative to the expected effects of geographic segregation in terms of both purchase activity and online communication. Furthermore, we find that segregation increases with difference in socio-economic status but is asymmetric for purchase activity, i.e., the amount of interaction from poorer to wealthier neighborhoods is larger than vice versa. Our results provide novel insights into the understanding of behavioral segregation in human interactions with significant socio-political and economic implications.
In order to estimate the seismic vulnerability of a densely populated urban area, it would in principle be necessary to evaluate the dynamic behaviour of individual and aggregate buildings. These detailed seismic analyses, however, are extremely cost-intensive and require great processing time and expertise judgment. The aim of the present study is to propose a new methodology able to combine information and tools coming from different scientific fields in order to reproduce the effects of a seismic input in urban areas with known geological features and to estimate the entity of the damages caused on existing buildings. In particular, we present new software called ABES (Agent-Based Earthquake Simulator), based on a Self-Organized Criticality framework, which allows to evaluate the effects of a sequence of seismic events on a certain large urban area during a given interval of time. The integration of Geographic Information System (GIS) data sets, concerning both geological and urban information about the territory of Avola (Italy), allows performing a parametric study of these effects on a real context as a case study. The proposed new approach could be very useful in estimating the seismic vulnerability and defining planning strategies for seismic risk reduction in large urban areas
Discriminating between competing explanatory models as to which is more likely responsible for the growth of a network is a problem of fundamental importance for network science. The rules governing this growth are attributed to mechanisms such as preferential attachment and triangle closure, with a wealth of explanatory models based on these. These models are deliberately simple, commonly with the network growing according to a constant mechanism for its lifetime, to allow for analytical results. We use a likelihood-based framework on artificial data where the network model changes at a known point in time and demonstrate that we can recover the change point from analysis of the network. We then use real datasets and demonstrate how our framework can show the changing importance of network growth mechanisms over time.
Locating sources of diffusion and spreading from minimum data is a significant problem in network science with great applied values to the society. However, a general theoretical framework dealing with optimal source localization is lacking. Combining the controllability theory for complex networks and compressive sensing, we develop a framework with high efficiency and robustness for optimal source localization in arbitrary weighted networks with arbitrary distribution of sources. We offer a minimum output analysis to quantify the source locatability through a minimal number of messenger nodes that produce sufficient measurement for fully locating the sources. When the minimum messenger nodes are discerned, the problem of optimal source localization becomes one of sparse signal reconstruction, which can be solved using compressive sensing. Application of our framework to model and empirical networks demonstrates that sources in homogeneous and denser networks are more readily to be located. A surprising finding is that, for a connected undirected network with random link weights and weak noise, a single messenger node is sufficient for locating any number of sources. The framework deepens our understanding of the network source localization problem and offers efficient tools with broad applications.