No Arabic abstract
Many real-world networks are known to exhibit facts that counter our knowledge prescribed by the theories on network creation and communication patterns. A common prerequisite in network analysis is that information on nodes and links will be complete because network topologies are extremely sensitive to missing information of this kind. Therefore, many real-world networks that fail to meet this criterion under random sampling may be discarded. In this paper we offer a framework for interpreting the missing observations in network data under the hypothesis that these observations are not missing at random. We demonstrate the methodology with a case study of a financial trade network, where the awareness of agents to the data collection procedure by a self-interested observer may result in strategic revealing or withholding of information. The non-random missingness has been overlooked despite the possibility of this being an important feature of the processes by which the network is generated. The analysis demonstrates that strategic information withholding may be a valid general phenomenon in complex systems. The evidence is sufficient to support the existence of an influential observer and to offer a compelling dynamic mechanism for the creation of the network.
It is generally accepted that neighboring nodes in financial networks are negatively assorted with respect to the correlation between their degrees. This feature would play an important damping role in the market during downturns (periods of distress) since this connectivity pattern between firms lowers the chances of auto-amplifying (the propagation of) distress. In this paper we explore a trade-network of industrial firms where the nodes are suppliers or buyers, and the links are those invoices that the suppliers send out to their buyers and then go on to present to their bank for discounting. The network was collected by a large Italian bank in 2007, from their intermediation of the sales on credit made by their clients. The network also shows dissortative behavior as seen in other studies on financial networks. However, when looking at the credit rating of the firms, an important attribute internal to each node, we find that firms that trade with one another share overwhelming similarity. We know that much data is missing from our data set. However, we can quantify the amount of missing data using information exposure, a variable that connects social structure and behavior. This variable is a ratio of the sales invoices that a supplier presents to their bank over their total sales. Results reveal a non-trivial and robust relationship between the information exposure and credit rating of a firm, indicating the influence of the neighbors on a firms rating. This methodology provides a new insight into how to reconstruct a network suffering from incomplete information.
A number of predictors have been suggested to detect the most influential spreaders of information in online social media across various domains such as Twitter or Facebook. In particular, degree, PageRank, k-core and other centralities have been adopted to rank the spreading capability of users in information dissemination media. So far, validation of the proposed predictors has been done by simulating the spreading dynamics rather than following real information flow in social networks. Consequently, only model-dependent contradictory results have been achieved so far for the best predictor. Here, we address this issue directly. We search for influential spreaders by following the real spreading dynamics in a wide range of networks. We find that the widely-used degree and PageRank fail in ranking users influence. We find that the best spreaders are consistently located in the k-core across dissimilar social platforms such as Twitter, Facebook, Livejournal and scientific publishing in the American Physical Society. Furthermore, when the complete global network structure is unavailable, we find that the sum of the nearest neighbors degree is a reliable local proxy for users influence. Our analysis provides practical instructions for optimal design of strategies for viral information dissemination in relevant applications.
Recent wide-spread adoption of electronic and pervasive technologies has enabled the study of human behavior at an unprecedented level, uncovering universal patterns underlying human activity, mobility, and inter-personal communication. In the present work, we investigate whether deviations from these universal patterns may reveal information about the socio-economical status of geographical regions. We quantify the extent to which deviations in diurnal rhythm, mobility patterns, and communication styles across regions relate to their unemployment incidence. For this we examine a country-scale publicly articulated social media dataset, where we quantify individual behavioral features from over 145 million geo-located messages distributed among more than 340 different Spanish economic regions, inferred by computing communities of cohesive mobility fluxes. We find that regions exhibiting more diverse mobility fluxes, earlier diurnal rhythms, and more correct grammatical styles display lower unemployment rates. As a result, we provide a simple model able to produce accurate, easily interpretable reconstruction of regional unemployment incidence from their social-media digital fingerprints alone. Our results show that cost-effective economical indicators can be built based on publicly-available social media datasets.
Real networks often form interacting parts of larger and more complex systems. Examples can be found in different domains, ranging from the Internet to structural and functional brain networks. Here, we show that these multiplex systems are not random combinations of single network layers. Instead, they are organized in specific ways dictated by hidden geometric correlations between the individual layers. We find that these correlations are strong in different real multiplexes, and form a key framework for answering many important questions. Specifically, we show that these geometric correlations facilitate: (i) the definition and detection of multidimensional communities, which are sets of nodes that are simultaneously similar in multiple layers; (ii) accurate trans-layer link prediction, where connections in one layer can be predicted by observing the hidden geometric space of another layer; and (iii) efficient targeted navigation in the multilayer system using only local knowledge, which outperforms navigation in the single layers only if the geometric correlations are sufficiently strong. Our findings uncover fundamental organizing principles behind real multiplexes and can have important applications in diverse domains.
In this paper we apply techniques of complex network analysis to data sources representing public funding programs and discuss the importance of the considered indicators for program evaluation. Starting from the Open Data repository of the 2007-2013 Italian Program Programma Operativo Nazionale Ricerca e Competitivit`a (PON R&C), we build a set of data models and perform network analysis over them. We discuss the obtained experimental results outlining interesting new perspectives that emerge from the application of the proposed methods to the socio-economical evaluation of funded programs.