A flag complex can be defined as a simplicial complex whose simplices correspond to complete subgraphs of its 1-skeleton taken as a graph. In this article, by introducing the notion of s-dismantlability, we shall define the s-homotopy type of a graph
and show in particular that two finite graphs have the same s-homotopy type if, and only if, the two flag complexes determined by these graphs have the same simplicial simple-homotopy type (Theorem 2.10, part 1). This result is closely related to similar results established by Barmak and Minian (Adv. in Math., 218 (2008), 87-104) in the framework of posets and we give the relation between the two approaches (theorems 3.5 and 3.7). We conclude with a question about the relation between the s-homotopy and the graph homotopy defined by Chen, Yau and Yeh (Discrete Math., 241(2001), 153-170).
Large graphs are natural mathematical models for describing the structure of the data in a wide variety of fields, such as web mining, social networks, information retrieval, biological networks, etc. For all these applications, automatic tools are r
equired to get a synthetic view of the graph and to reach a good understanding of the underlying problem. In particular, discovering groups of tightly connected vertices and understanding the relations between those groups is very important in practice. This paper shows how a kernel version of the batch Self Organizing Map can be used to achieve these goals via kernels derived from the Laplacian matrix of the graph, especially when it is used in conjunction with more classical methods based on the spectral analysis of the graph. The proposed method is used to explore the structure of a medieval social network modeled through a weighted graph that has been directly built from a large corpus of agrarian contracts.
