We introduce the concept of community trees that summarizes topological structures within a network. A community tree is a tree structure representing clique communities from the clique percolation method (CPM). The community tree also generates a persistent diagram. Community trees and persistent diagrams reveal topological structures of the underlying networks and can be used as visualization tools. We study the stability of community trees and derive a quantity called the total star number (TSN) that presents an upper bound on the change of community trees. Our findings provide a topological interpretation for the stability of communities generated by the CPM.
A message passing algorithm is derived for recovering communities within a graph generated by a variation of the Barab{a}si-Albert preferential attachment model. The estimator is assumed to know the arrival times, or order of attachment, of the vertices. The derivation of the algorithm is based on belief propagation under an independence assumption. Two precursors to the message passing algorithm are analyzed: the first is a degree thresholding (DT) algorithm and the second is an algorithm based on the arrival times of the children (C) of a given vertex, where the children of a given vertex are the vertices that attached to it. Comparison of the performance of the algorithms shows it is beneficial to know the arrival times, not just the number, of the children. The probability of correct classification of a vertex is asymptotically determined by the fraction of vertices arriving before it. Two extensions of Algorithm C are given: the first is based on joint likelihood of the children of a fixed set of vertices; it can sometimes be used to seed the message passing algorithm. The second is the message passing algorithm. Simulation results are given.
We consider learning of fundamental properties of communities in large noisy networks, in the prototypical situation where the nodes or users are split into two classes according to a binary property, e.g., according to their opinions or preferences on a topic. For learning these properties, we propose a nonparametric, unsupervised, and scalable graph scan procedure that is, in addition, robust against a class of powerful adversaries. In our setup, one of the communities can fall under the influence of a knowledgeable adversarial leader, who knows the full network structure, has unlimited computational resources and can completely foresee our planned actions on the network. We prove strong consistency of our results in this setup with minimal assumptions. In particular, the learning procedure estimates the baseline activity of normal users asymptotically correctly with probability 1; the only assumption being the existence of a single implicit community of asymptotically negligible logarithmic size. We provide experiments on real and synthetic data to illustrate the performance of our method, including examples with adversaries.
Time-stamped data are increasingly available for many social, economic, and information systems that can be represented as networks growing with time. The World Wide Web, social contact networks, and citation networks of scientific papers and online news articles, for example, are of this kind. Static methods can be inadequate for the analysis of growing networks as they miss essential information on the systems dynamics. At the same time, time-aware methods require the choice of an observation timescale, yet we lack principled ways to determine it. We focus on the popular community detection problem which aims to partition a networks nodes into meaningful groups. We use a multi-layer quality function to show, on both synthetic and real datasets, that the observation timescale that leads to optimal communities is tightly related to the systems intrinsic aging timescale that can be inferred from the time-stamped network data. The use of temporal information leads to drastically different conclusions on the community structure of real information networks, which challenges the current understanding of the large-scale organization of growing networks. Our findings indicate that before attempting to assess structural patterns of evolving networks, it is vital to uncover the timescales of the dynamical processes that generated them.
Community detection or clustering is a crucial task for understanding the structure of complex systems. In some networks, nodes are permitted to be linked by either positive or negative edges; such networks are called signed networks. Discovering communities in signed networks is more challenging than that in unsigned networks. In this study, we innovatively develop a non-backtracking matrix of signed networks, theoretically derive a detectability threshold for this matrix, and demonstrate the feasibility of using the matrix for community detection. We further improve the developed matrix by considering the balanced paths in the network (referred to as a balanced non-backtracking matrix). Simulation results demonstrate that the algorithm based on the balanced nonbacktracking matrix significantly outperforms those based on the adjacency matrix and the signed non-backtracking matrix. The proposed (improved) matrix shows great potential for detecting communities with or without overlap.
A set $D$ of vertices of a graph $G$ is a total dominating set if every vertex of $G$ is adjacent to at least one vertex of $D$. The total domination number of $G$ is the minimum cardinality of any total dominating set of $G$ and is denoted by $gamma_t(G)$. The total dominating set $D$ is called a total co-independent dominating set if $V(G)setminus D$ is an independent set and has at least one vertex. The minimum cardinality of any total co-independent dominating set is denoted by $gamma_{t,coi}(G)$. In this paper, we show that, for any tree $T$ of order $n$ and diameter at least three, $n-beta(T)leq gamma_{t,coi}(T)leq n-|L(T)|$ where $beta(T)$ is the maximum cardinality of any independent set and $L(T)$ is the set of leaves of $T$. We also characterize the families of trees attaining the extremal bounds above and show that the differences between the value of $gamma_{t,coi}(T)$ and these bounds can be arbitrarily large for some classes of trees.