No Arabic abstract
Community structure is one of the most relevant features encountered in numerous real-world applications of networked systems. Despite the tremendous effort of scientists working on this subject over the past few decades to characterize, model, and analyze communities, more investigations are needed to better understand the impact of community structure and its dynamics on networked systems. Here, we first focus on generative models of communities in complex networks and their role in developing strong foundation for community detection algorithms. We discuss modularity and the use of modularity maximization as the basis for community detection. Then, we overview the Stochastic Block Model, its different variants, and inference of community structures from such models. Next, we focus on time evolving networks, where existing nodes and links can disappear and/or new nodes and links may be introduced. The extraction of communities under such circumstances poses an interesting and non-trivial problem that has gained considerable interest over the last decade. We briefly discuss considerable advances made in this field recently. Finally, we focus on immunization strategies essential for targeting the influential spreaders of epidemics in modular networks. Their main goal is to select and immunize a small proportion of individuals from the whole network to control the diffusion process. Various strategies have emerged over the years suggesting different ways to immunize nodes in networks with overlapping and non-overlapping community structure. We first discuss stochastic strategies that require little or no information about the network topology at the expense of their performance. Then, we introduce deterministic strategies that have proven to be very efficient in controlling the epidemic outbreaks, but require complete knowledge of the network.
We introduce the concept of control centrality to quantify the ability of a single node to control a directed weighted network. We calculate the distribution of control centrality for several real networks and find that it is mainly determined by the networks degree distribution. We rigorously prove that in a directed network without loops the control centrality of a node is uniquely determined by its layer index or topological position in the underlying hierarchical structure of the network. Inspired by the deep relation between control centrality and hierarchical structure in a general directed network, we design an efficient attack strategy against the controllability of malicious networks.
Many networks in nature, society and technology are characterized by a mesoscopic level of organization, with groups of nodes forming tightly connected units, called communities or modules, that are only weakly linked to each other. Uncovering this community structure is one of the most important problems in the field of complex networks. Networks often show a hierarchical organization, with communities embedded within other communities; moreover, nodes can be shared between different communities. Here we present the first algorithm that finds both overlapping communities and the hierarchical structure. The method is based on the local optimization of a fitness function. Community structure is revealed by peaks in the fitness histogram. The resolution can be tuned by a parameter enabling to investigate different hierarchical levels of organization. Tests on real and artificial networks give excellent results.
Weak ties play a significant role in the structures and the dynamics of community networks. Based on the susceptible-infected model in contact process, we study numerically how weak ties influence the predictability of epidemic dynamics. We first investigate the effects of different kinds of weak ties on the variabilities of both the arrival time and the prevalence of disease, and find that the bridgeness with small degree can enhance the predictability of epidemic spreading. Once weak ties are settled, compared with the variability of arrival time, the variability of prevalence displays a diametrically opposed changing trend with both the distance of the initial seed to the bridgeness and the degree of the initial seed. More specifically, the further distance and the larger degree of the initial seed can induce the better predictability of arrival time and the worse predictability of prevalence. Moreover, we discuss the effects of weak tie number on the epidemic variability. As community strength becomes very strong, which is caused by the decrease of weak tie number, the epidemic variability will change dramatically. Compared with the case of hub seed and random seed, the bridgenss seed can result in the worst predictability of arrival time and the best predictability of prevalence. These results show that the variability of arrival time always marks a complete reversal trend of that of prevalence, which implies it is impossible to predict epidemic spreading in the early stage of outbreaks accurately.
Most previous studies of epidemic dynamics on complex networks suppose that the disease will eventually stabilize at either a disease-free state or an endemic one. In reality, however, some epidemics always exhibit sporadic and recurrent behaviour in one region because of the invasion from an endemic population elsewhere. In this paper we address this issue and study a susceptible-infected-susceptible epidemiological model on a network consisting of two communities, where the disease is endemic in one community but alternates between outbreaks and extinctions in the other. We provide a detailed characterization of the temporal dynamics of epidemic patterns in the latter community. In particular, we investigate the time duration of both outbreak and extinction, and the time interval between two consecutive inter-community infections, as well as their frequency distributions. Based on the mean-field theory, we theoretically analyze these three timescales and their dependence on the average node degree of each community, the transmission parameters, and the number of intercommunity links, which are in good agreement with simulations, except when the probability of overlaps between successive outbreaks is too large. These findings aid us in better understanding the bursty nature of disease spreading in a local community, and thereby suggesting effective time-dependent control strategies.
In recent years the research community has accumulated overwhelming evidence for the emergence of complex and heterogeneous connectivity patterns in a wide range of biological and sociotechnical systems. The complex properties of real-world networks have a profound impact on the behavior of equilibrium and nonequilibrium phenomena occurring in various systems, and the study of epidemic spreading is central to our understanding of the unfolding of dynamical processes in complex networks. The theoretical analysis of epidemic spreading in heterogeneous networks requires the development of novel analytical frameworks, and it has produced results of conceptual and practical relevance. A coherent and comprehensive review of the vast research activity concerning epidemic processes is presented, detailing the successful theoretical approaches as well as making their limits and assumptions clear. Physicists, mathematicians, epidemiologists, computer, and social scientists share a common interest in studying epidemic spreading and rely on similar models for the description of the diffusion of pathogens, knowledge, and innovation. For this reason, while focusing on the main results and the paradigmatic models in infectious disease modeling, the major results concerning generalized social contagion processes are also presented. Finally, the research activity at the forefront in the study of epidemic spreading in coevolving, coupled, and time-varying networks is reported.