No Arabic abstract
Recently, Broido & Clauset (2019) mentioned that (strict) Scale-Free networks were rare, in real life. This might be related to the statement of Stumpf, Wiuf & May (2005), that sub-networks of scale-free networks are not scale-free. In the later, those sub-networks are asymptotically scale-free, but one should not forget about second-order deviation (possibly also third order actually). In this article, we introduce a concept of extended scale-free network, inspired by the extended Pareto distribution, that actually is maybe more realistic to describe real network than the strict scale free property. This property is consistent with Stumpf, Wiuf & May (2005): sub-network of scale-free larger networks are not strictly scale-free, but extended scale-free.
Adversarial attacks have been alerting the artificial intelligence community recently, since many machine learning algorithms were found vulnerable to malicious attacks. This paper studies adversarial attacks to scale-free networks to test their robustness in terms of statistical measures. In addition to the well-known random link rewiring (RLR) attack, two heuristic attacks are formulated and simulated: degree-addition-based link rewiring (DALR) and degree-interval-based link rewiring (DILR). These three strategies are applied to attack a number of strong scale-free networks of various sizes generated from the Barabasi-Albert model. It is found that both DALR and DILR are more effective than RLR, in the sense that rewiring a smaller number of links can succeed in the same attack. However, DILR is as concealed as RLR in the sense that they both are constructed by introducing a relatively small number of changes on several typical structural properties such as average shortest path-length, average clustering coefficient, and average diagonal distance. The results of this paper suggest that to classify a network to be scale-free has to be very careful from the viewpoint of adversarial attack effects.
Heterogeneous networks are networks consisting of different types of nodes and multiple types of edges linking such nodes. While community detection has been extensively developed as a useful technique for analyzing networks that contain only one type of nodes, very few community detection techniques have been developed for heterogeneous networks. In this paper, we propose a modularity based community detection framework for heterogeneous networks. Unlike existing methods, the proposed approach has the flexibility to treat the number of communities as an unknown quantity. We describe a Louvain type maximization method for finding the community structure that maximizes the modularity function. Our simulation results show the advantages of the proposed method over existing methods. Moreover, the proposed modularity function is shown to be consistent under a heterogeneous stochastic blockmodel framework. Analyses of the DBLP four-area dataset and a MovieLens dataset demonstrate the usefulness of the proposed method.
Multi-edge networks capture repeated interactions between individuals. In social networks, such edges often form closed triangles, or triads. Standard approaches to measure this triadic closure, however, fail for multi-edge networks, because they do not consider that triads can be formed by edges of different multiplicity. We propose a novel measure of triadic closure for multi-edge networks of social interactions based on a shared partner statistic. We demonstrate that our operalization is able to detect meaningful closure in synthetic and empirical multi-edge networks, where common approaches fail. This is a cornerstone in driving inferential network analyses from the analysis of binary networks towards the analyses of multi-edge and weighted networks, which offer a more realistic representation of social interactions and relations.
How people connect with one another is a fundamental question in the social sciences, and the resulting social networks can have a profound impact on our daily lives. Blau offered a powerful explanation: people connect with one another based on their positions in a social space. Yet a principled measure of social distance, allowing comparison within and between societies, remains elusive. We use the connectivity kernel of conditionally-independent edge models to develop a family of segregation statistics with desirable properties: they offer an intuitive and universal characteristic scale on social space (facilitating comparison across datasets and societies), are applicable to multivariate and mixed node attributes, and capture segregation at the level of individuals, pairs of individuals, and society as a whole. We show that the segregation statistics can induce a metric on Blau space (a space spanned by the attributes of the members of society) and provide maps of two societies. Under a Bayesian paradigm, we infer the parameters of the connectivity kernel from eleven ego-network datasets collected in four surveys in the United Kingdom and United States. The importance of different dimensions of Blau space is similar across time and location, suggesting a macroscopically stable social fabric. Physical separation and age differences have the most significant impact on segregation within friendship networks with implications for intergenerational mixing and isolation in later stages of life.
In many complex systems, networks and graphs arise in a natural manner. Often, time evolving behavior can be easily found and modeled using time-series methodology. Amongst others, two common research problems in network analysis are community detection and change-point detection. Community detection aims at finding specific sub-structures within the networks, and change-point detection tries to find the time points at which sub-structures change. We propose a novel methodology to detect both community structures and change points simultaneously based on a model selection framework in which the Minimum Description Length Principle (MDL) is utilized as minimizing objective criterion. The promising practical performance of the proposed method is illustrated via a series of numerical experiments and real data analysis.