Precisely quantifying the heterogeneity or disorder of a network system is very important and desired in studies of behavior and function of the network system. Although many degree-based entropies have been proposed to measure the heterogeneity of r
eal networks, heterogeneity implicated in the structure of networks can not be precisely quantified yet. Hence, we propose a new structure entropy based on automorphism partition to precisely quantify the structural heterogeneity of networks. Analysis of extreme cases shows that entropy based on automorphism partition can quantify the structural heterogeneity of networks more precisely than degree-based entropy. We also summarized symmetry and heterogeneity statistics of many real networks, finding that real networks are indeed more heterogenous in the view of automorphism partition than what have been depicted under the measurement of degree based entropies; and that structural heterogeneity is strongly negatively correlated to symmetry of real networks.
Recently, great efforts have been dedicated to researches on the management of large scale graph based data such as WWW, social networks, biological networks. In the study of graph based data management, node disjoint subgraph homeomorphism relation
between graphs is more suitable than (sub)graph isomorphism in many cases, especially in those cases that node skipping and node mismatching are allowed. However, no efficient node disjoint subgraph homeomorphism determination (ndSHD) algorithms have been available. In this paper, we propose two computationally efficient ndSHD algorithms based on state spaces searching with backtracking, which employ many heuristics to prune the search spaces. Experimental results on synthetic data sets show that the proposed algorithms are efficient, require relative little time in most of the testing cases, can scale to large or dense graphs, and can accommodate to more complex fuzzy matching cases.
