Several recent studies of complex networks have suggested algorithms for locating network communities, also called modules or clusters, which are mostly defined as groups of nodes with dense internal connections. Along with the rapid development of these clustering techniques, the ability of revealing overlaps between communities has become very important as well. An efficient search technique for locating overlapping modules is provided by the Clique Percolation Method (CPM) and its extension to directed graphs, the CPMd algorithm. Here we investigate the centrality properties of directed module members in social networks obtained from e-mail exchanges and from sociometric questionnaires. Our results indicate that nodes in the overlaps between modules play a central role in the studied systems. Furthermore, the two different types of networks show interesting differences in the relation between the centrality measures and the role of the nodes in the directed modules.
Many systems, ranging from biological and engineering systems to social systems, can be modeled as directed networks, with links representing directed interaction between two nodes. To assess the importance of a node in a directed network, various centrality measures based on different criteria have been proposed. However, calculating the centrality of a node is often difficult because of the overwhelming size of the network or the incomplete information about the network. Thus, developing an approximation method for estimating centrality measures is needed. In this study, we focus on modular …
Determining the relative importance of nodes in directed networks is important in, for example, ranking websites, publications, and sports teams, and for understanding signal flows in systems biology. A prevailing centrality measure in this respect is the PageRank. In this work, we focus on another class of centrality derived from the Laplacian of the network. We extend the Laplacian-based centrality, which has mainly been applied to strongly connected networks, to the case of general directed networks such that we can quantitatively compare arbitrary nodes. Toward this end, we adopt the idea …
Today, there exist many centrality measures for assessing the importance of nodes in a network as a function of their position and the underlying topology. One class of such measures builds on eigenvector centrality, where the importance of a node is derived from the importance of its neighboring nodes. For directed and weighted complex networks, where the nodes can carry some intrinsic property value, there have been centrality measures proposed that are variants of eigenvector centrality. However, these expressions all suffer from shortcomings. Here, an extension of such centrality measures …
In this paper some results about the controllability of spectral centrality in a complex network are presented. In particular, the inverse problem of designing an unweigthed graph with a prescribed centrality is considered, by showing that for every possible ranking eventually with ties, an unweighted directed/undirected complex network can be found whose PageRank or eigenvector centrality gives the ranking considered. Different families of networks are presented in order to analytically solve this problem either for directed and undirected graphs with and without loops.
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 network's 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 dire…
PageRank (PR) is a fundamental tool for assessing the relative importance of the nodes in a network. In this paper, we propose a measure, weighted PageRank (WPR), extended from the classical PR for weighted, directed networks with possible non-uniform node-specific information that is dependent or independent of network structure. A tuning parameter leveraging node degree and strength is introduced. An efficient algorithm based on R program has been developed for computing WPR in large-scale networks. We have tested the proposed WPR on widely used simulated network models, and found it outperf…
Many complex networks are described by directed links; in such networks, a link represents, for example, the control of one node over the other node or unidirectional information flows. Some centrality measures are used to determine the relative importance of nodes specifically in directed networks. We analyze such a centrality measure called the influence. The influence represents the importance of nodes in various dynamics such as synchronization, evolutionary dynamics, random walk, and social dynamics. We analytically calculate the influence in various networks, including directed multipart…
Influence Maximization (IM) aims at finding the most influential users in a social network, i. e., users who maximize the spread of an opinion within a certain propagation model. Previous work investigated the correlation between influence spread and nodal centrality measures to bypass more expensive IM simulations. The results were promising but incomplete, since these studies investigated the performance (i. e., the ability to identify influential users) of centrality measures only in restricted settings, e. g., in undirected/unweighted networks and/or within a propagation model less common …
We describe centralities in temporal networks using a supracentrality framework to study centrality trajectories, which characterize how the importances of nodes change in time. We study supracentrality generalizations of eigenvector-based centralities, a family of centrality measures for time-independent networks that includes PageRank, hub and authority scores, and eigenvector centrality. We start with a sequence of adjacency matrices, each of which represents a time layer of a network at a different point or interval of time. Coupling centrality matrices across time layers with weighted int…
In this work, we analyse and predict the stability of communities in complex networks. We use a variant of closeness centrality, known as profile closeness, to measure the loyalty of a member towards its community. We show that the profile closeness is an adequate indicator of how communities evolve in a network. We investigate this in static as well as dynamic (temporal) networks and establish the relevance of profile closeness in predicting the evolution of a complex network. Keywords: Small world networks , Centrality , Community , Closeness , Clustering
We study the popular centrality measure known as effective conductance or in some circles as information centrality. This is an important notion of centrality for undirected networks, with many applications, e.g., for random walks, electrical resistor networks, epidemic spreading, etc. In this paper, we first reinterpret this measure in terms of modulus (energy) of families of walks on the network. This modulus centrality measure coincides with the effective conductance measure on simple undirected networks, and extends it to much more general situations, e.g., directed networks as well. Secon…
Betweenness centrality (BC) was proposed as an indicator of the extent of an individual's influence in a social network. It is measured by counting how many times a vertex (i.e., an individual) appears on all the shortest paths between pairs of vertices. A question naturally arises as to how the influence of a team or group in a social network can be measured. Here, we propose a method of measuring this influence on a bipartite graph comprising vertices (individuals) and hyperedges (teams). When the hyperedge size varies, the number of shortest paths between two vertices in a hypergraph can be…
We present a systematic and detailed study of the robustness of directed networks under random and targeted removal of links. We work with a set of network models of random and scale free type, generated with specific features of clustering and assortativity. Various strategies like random deletion of links, or deletions based on betweenness centrality and degrees of source and target nodes, are used to breakdown the networks. The robustness of the networks to the sustained loss of links is studied in terms of the sizes of the connected components and the inverse path lengths. The effects of c…
This paper studies critical nodes or "middlemen" that intermediate flows in a directed network. The contestability of a node is introduced as a network topological concept of competitiveness meaning that an intermediary's role in the brokering of flows in the network can be substituted by a group of other nodes. We establish the equivalence of uncontested intermediaries and middlemen. The notion of node contestability gives rise to a measure that quantifies the control exercised by a middleman in a network. We present a comparison of this middleman centrality measures with relevant, establishe…
In our recent works, we developed a probabilistic framework for structural analysis in undirected networks. The key idea of that framework is to sample a network by a symmetric bivariate distribution and then use that bivariate distribution to formerly define various notions, including centrality, relative centrality, community, and modularity. The main objective of this paper is to extend the probabilistic framework to directed networks, where the sampling bivariate distributions could be asymmetric. Our main finding is that we can relax the assumption from symmetric bivariate distributions t…
In this paper, we studied the strategies to enhance synchronization on directed networks by manipulating a fixed number of links. We proposed a centrality-based reconstructing (CBR) method, where the node centrality is measured by the well-known PageRank algorithm. Extensive numerical simulation on many modeled networks demonstrated that the CBR method is more effective in facilitating synchronization than the degree-based reconstructing method and random reconstructing method for adding or removing links. The reason is that CBR method can effectively narrow the incoming degree distribution an…
Methods for efficiently controlling dynamics propagated on networks are usually based on identifying the most influential nodes. Knowledge of these nodes can be used for the targeted control of dynamics such as epidemics, or for modifying biochemical pathways relating to diseases. Similarly they are valuable for identifying points of failure to increase network resilience in, for example, social support networks and logistics networks. Many measures, often termed `centrality', have been constructed to achieve these aims. Here we consider Katz centrality and provide a new interpretation as a st…
Given a social network, which of its nodes are more central? This question has been asked many times in sociology, psychology and computer science, and a whole plethora of centrality measures (a.k.a. centrality indices, or rankings) were proposed to account for the importance of the nodes of a network. In this paper, we try to provide a mathematically sound survey of the most important classic centrality measures known from the literature and propose an axiomatic approach to establish whether they are actually doing what they have been designed for. Our axioms suggest some simple, basic proper…
We derive a composite centrality measure for general weighted and directed complex networks, based on measure standardisation and invariant statistical inheritance schemes. Different schemes generate different intermediate abstract measures providing additional information, while the composite centrality measure tends to the standard normal distribution. This offers a unified scale to measure node and edge centralities for complex evolving networks under a uniform framework. Considering two real-world cases of the world trade web and the world migration web, both during a time span of 40 years…
In our recent works, we developed a probabilistic framework for structural analysis in undirected networks and directed networks. The key idea of that framework is to sample a network by a symmetric and asymmetric bivariate distribution and then use that bivariate distribution to formerly defining various notions, including centrality, relative centrality, community, and modularity. The main objective of this paper is to extend the probabilistic definition to attributed networks, where sampling bivariate distributions by exponentially twisted sampling. Our main finding is that we find a way to…
Liu et al recently proposed a minimum number of driver nodes needed to obtain full structural controllability over a directed network. Driver nodes are unmatched nodes, from which there are directed paths to all matched nodes. Their most important assertion is that a system's controllability is to a great extent encoded by the underlying network's degree distribution, $P(k_{in}, k_{out})$. Is the controllability of a network decided almost completely by the immediate neighbourhood of a node, while, even slightly distant nodes play no role at all? Motivated by the above question, in this commun…
Critical nodes or "middlemen" have an essential place in both social and economic networks when considering the flow of information and trade. This paper extends the concept of critical nodes to directed networks. We identify strong and weak middlemen. Node contestability is introduced as a form of competition in networks; a duality between uncontested intermediaries and middlemen is established. The brokerage power of middlemen is formally expressed and a general algorithm is constructed to measure the brokerage power of each node from the networks adjacency matrix. Augmentations of the broke…
Force-directed layout algorithms produce graph drawings by resolving a system of emulated physical forces. We present techniques for using social gravity as an additional force in force-directed layouts, together with a scaling technique, to produce drawings of trees and forests, as well as more complex social networks. Social gravity assigns mass to vertices in proportion to their network centrality, which allows vertices that are more graph-theoretically central to be visualized in physically central locations. Scaling varies the gravitational force throughout the simulation, and reduces cro…
Networks and graphs provide a simple but effective model to a vast set of systems which building blocks interact throughout pairwise interactions. Unfortunately, such models fail to describe all those systems which building blocks interact at a higher order. Higher order graphs provide us the right tools for the task, but introduce a higher computing complexity due to the interaction order. In this paper we analyze the interplay between the structure of a directed hypergraph and a linear dynamical system, a random walk, defined on it. How can one extend network measures, such as centrality or …
The lack of studying the complex organization of directed network usually limits to the understanding of underlying relationship between network structures and functions. Structural controllability and structural predictability, two seemingly unrelated subjects, are revealed in this paper to be both highly dependent on the critical links previously thought to only be able to influence the number of driver nodes in controllable directed networks. Here, we show that critical links can not only contribute to structural controllability, but they can also have a significant impact on the structural…
The solution of today's complex problems requires the grouping of task forces whose members are usually connected remotely over long physical distances and different time zones. Hence, understanding the effects of imposed communication patterns (i.e., who can communicate with whom) on group performance is important. Here, we use an agent-based model to explore the influence of the betweenness centrality of the nodes on the time the group requires to find the global maxima of NK-fitness landscapes. The agents cooperate by broadcasting messages, informing on their fitness to their neighbors, and…
Gang violence is a major problem in the United States accounting for a large fraction of homicides and other violent crime. In this paper, we study the problem of early identification of violent gang members. Our approach relies on modified centrality measures that take into account additional data of the individuals in the social network of co-arrestees which together with other arrest metadata provide a rich set of features for a classification algorithm. We show our approach obtains high precision and recall (0.89 and 0.78 respectively) in the case where the entire network is known and out-…
The notions of subgraph centrality and communicability, based on the exponential of the adjacency matrix of the underlying graph, have been effectively used in the analysis of undirected networks. In this paper we propose an extension of these measures to directed networks, and we apply them to the problem of ranking hubs and authorities. The extension is achieved by bipartization, i.e., the directed network is mapped onto a bipartite undirected network with twice as many nodes in order to obtain a network with a symmetric adjacency matrix. We explicitly determine the exponential of this adjac…
We formulate and propose an algorithm (MultiRank) for the ranking of nodes and layers in large multiplex networks. MultiRank takes into account the full multiplex network structure of the data and exploits the dual nature of the network in terms of nodes and layers. The proposed centrality of the layers (influences) and the centrality of the nodes are determined by a coupled set of equations. The basic idea consists in assigning more centrality to nodes that receive links from highly influential layers and from already central nodes. The layers are more influential if highly central nodes are …
Network analysis is becoming increasingly relevant in the historical investigation of scientific communities and their knowledge circulation process, because it offers the opportunity to explore and visualize connections amog scientific actors on a scale qualitatively different from traditional historical methods. Temporal networks are especially suitable for this task, as they allow to investigate the evolution of scientific communities over time. In this paper we will rely on the analytical tools provided by temporal networks to examine the technical comission on agriculture (1913 - 1947) es…
The massive presence of silent members in online communities, the so-called lurkers, has long attracted the attention of researchers in social science, cognitive psychology, and computer-human interaction. However, the study of lurking phenomena represents an unexplored opportunity of research in data mining, information retrieval and related fields. In this paper, we take a first step towards the formal specification and analysis of lurking in social networks. We address the new problem of lurker ranking and propose the first centrality methods specifically conceived for ranking lurkers in so…
Here we present a range-limited approach to centrality measures in both non-weighted and weighted directed complex networks. We introduce an efficient method that generates for every node and every edge its betweenness centrality based on shortest paths of lengths not longer than $\ell = 1,...,L$ in case of non-weighted networks, and for weighted networks the corresponding quantities based on minimum weight paths with path weights not larger than $w_{\ell}=\ell Δ$, $\ell=1,2...,L=R/Δ$. These measures provide a systematic description on the positioning importance of a node (edge) with respect t…
To better understand and manage complex systems like ecosystems it is critical to know the relative contribution of system components to system functioning. Ecologists and social scientists have described many ways that individuals can be important; This paper makes two key contributions to this research area. First, it shows that throughflow, the total energy-matter entering or exiting a system component, is a global indicator of the relative contribution of the component to the whole system activity. It is global because it includes the direct and indirect exchanges among community members. …
Distance Backbones Optimize Spreading Dynamics and Centrality Ranks in the Sparsification of Complex Networks
Politecnico di Torino（都灵理工大学）；CENTAI Institute（CENTAI研究所）；Universidade Católica Portuguesa, Católica Medical School, Católica Biomedical Research Centre（葡萄牙天主教大学，天主教医学院，天主教生物医学研究中心）；Binghamton University (State University of New York)（宾厄姆顿大学（纽约州立大学））
A number of network structural characteristics have recently been the subject of particularly intense research, including degree distributions, community structure, and various measures of vertex centrality, to mention only a few. Vertices may have attributes associated with them; for example, properties of proteins in protein-protein interaction networks, users' social network profiles, or authors' publication histories in co-authorship networks. In a network, two vertices might be considered similar if they have similar attributes (features, properties), or they can be considered similar bas…
The structure of contact networks affects the likelihood of disease spread at the population scale and the risk of infection at any given node. Though this has been well characterized for both theoretical and empirical networks for the spread of epidemics on completely susceptible networks, the long-term impact of network structure on risk of infection with an endemic pathogen has been less well characterized. Here, we analyze detailed records of the transportation of cattle between farms in Turkey to characterize the global and local attributes of the shipments network between 2007-2012, buil…
A deep community in a graph is a connected component that can only be seen after removal of nodes or edges from the rest of the graph. This paper formulates the problem of detecting deep communities as multi-stage node removal that maximizes a new centrality measure, called the local Fiedler vector centrality (LFVC), at each stage. The LFVC is associated with the sensitivity of algebraic connectivity to node or edge removals. We prove that a greedy node/edge removal strategy, based on successive maximization of LFVC, has bounded performance loss relative to the optimal, but intractable, combin…
The widespread relevance of complex networks is a valuable tool in the analysis of a broad range of systems. There is a demand for tools which enable the extraction of meaningful information and allow the comparison between different systems. We present a novel measure of similarity between nodes in different networks as a generalization of the concept of self-similarity. A similarity matrix is assembled as the distance between feature vectors that contain the in and out paths of all lengths for each node. Hence, nodes operating in a similar flow environment are considered similar regardless o…
Higher-order rich clubs and configuration models on general directed hypergraphs
Nottingham Trent University（诺丁汉特伦特大学）；Max Planck Institute for Mathematics in the Sciences（马克斯·普朗克科学计量学研究所）；Institute of Clinical and Preventive Medicine, University of Latvia（拉脱维亚大学临床与预防医学研究所）；Graz University of Technology（格拉茨工业大学）；Computer and Information Sciences, University of Strathclyde（思克莱德大学计算机与信息科学学院）；Max Planck Institute of Molecular Cell Biology and Genetics (MPI-CBG)（马克斯·普朗克分子细胞生物学与遗传学研究所）；Center for Systems Biology Dresden (CSBD)（德累斯顿系统生物学中心）
