Multi-agent networks are often modeled as interaction graphs, where the nodes represent the agents and the edges denote some direct interactions. The robustness of a multi-agent network to perturbations such as failures, noise, or malicious attacks largely depends on the corresponding graph. In many applications, networks are desired to have well-connected interaction graphs with relatively small number of links. One family of such graphs is the random regular graphs. In this paper, we present a decentralized scheme for transforming any connected interaction graph with a possibly non-integer average degree of @math into a connected random @math -regular graph for some @math . Accordingly, the agents improve the robustness of the network while maintaining a similar number of links as the initial configuration by locally adding or removing some edges.
In some applications, the robustness of a graph is related to the centrality measures such as the degree, betweenness, closeness, and eigenvector centralities. Loosely speaking, the centrality measures capture the relative importances of the nodes in a graph. Detailed reviews on the centrality measures and their applications can be found in @cite_9 @cite_37 and the references therein. Typically, the perturbations applied to the nodes with higher centrality scores have a stronger impact on the overall system (e.g., @cite_26 @cite_18 @cite_21 @cite_0 ). Hence, graphs with unbalanced centrality distributions are usually vulnerable to such worst-case perturbations.
@cite_18 @cite_26 @cite_37 @cite_9 @cite_21 @cite_0
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We use measures of vertex centrality to examine interlocking directorates and their economic effects in Italy. We employ centrality measures like degree, eigenvector centrality, betweenness, and flow betweenness, along with the clustering coefficient. We document the existence of a negative relationship between both degree and eigenvector centrality and firm value. Betweenness and flow betweenness, on the other hand, are not associated with lower firm valuations. We argue that these differences derive from the different properties of these measures: while degree and eigenvector centrality measures the influence and the power of the connections, betweenness and flow betweenness are proxies for the volume of information that passes between the nodes. This result is robust with respect to the use of both stock market and operating performance measures, as well as several controlling variables. The significance of an entity in a network is generally given by the centrality value of its vertex. For most analysis purposes, only the high ranked vertices are required. However, most algorithms calculate the centrality values of all the vertices. We present an extremely fast and scalable algorithm for identifying the high closeness centrality vertices, using group testing. We show that our approach is significantly faster (best-case over 50 times, worst-case over 7 times) than the currently used methods. We can also use group testing to identify networks that are sensitive to edge perturbation. Numerous centrality measures have been developed to quantify the importances of nodes in time-independent networks, and many of them can be expressed as the leading eigenvector of some matrix. With the increasing availability of network data that changes in time, it is important to extend such eigenvector-based centrality measures to time-dependent networks. In this paper, we introduce a principled generalization of network centrality measures that is valid for any eigenvector-based centrality. We consider a temporal network with @math nodes as a sequence of @math layers that describe the network during different time windows, and we couple centrality matrices for the layers into a supracentrality matrix of size @math whose dominant eigenvector gives the centrality of each node @math at each time @math . We refer to this eigenvector and its components as a joint centrality, as it reflects the importances of both the node @math and the time layer @math . We also introduce the concepts of marginal and conditional... Centrality measures are used in network science to rank the relative importance of nodes and edges of a graph. Here we define new measures of centrality for power grid structure that are based on its functionality. We show that the relative importance analysis based on centrality in graph theory can be generalized to power grid network with its electrical parameters taken into account. In the paper we experiment with the proposed electrical centrality measures on the NYISO-2935 system and the IEEE 300-bus system. We analyze the centrality distribution in order to identify important nodes or branches in the system which are of essential importance in terms of system vulnerability. We also present and discuss a number of interesting discoveries regarding the importance rank of power grid nodes and branches. An analysis is conducted on the robustness of measures of centrality in the face of random error in the network data. We use random networks of varying sizes and densities and subject them (separately) to four kinds of random error in varying amounts. The types of error are edge deletion, node deletion, edge addition, and node addition. The results show that the accuracy of centrality measures declines smoothly and predictably with the amount of error. This suggests that, for random networks and random error, we shall be able to construct confidence intervals around centrality scores. In addition, centrality measures were highly similar in their response to error. Dense networks were the most robust in the face of all kinds of error except edge deletion. For edge deletion, sparse networks were more accurately measured. Eigenvector centrality is a common measure of the importance of nodes in a network. Here we show that under common conditions the eigenvector centrality displays a localization transition that causes most of the weight of the centrality to concentrate on a small number of nodes in the network. In this regime the measure is no longer useful for distinguishing among the remaining nodes and its efficacy as a network metric is impaired. As a remedy, we propose an alternative centrality measure based on the nonbacktracking matrix, which gives results closely similar to the standard eigenvector centrality in dense networks where the latter is well behaved, but avoids localization and gives useful results in regimes where the standard centrality fails. Betweenness centrality is a fundamental measure in social network analysis, expressing the importance or influence of individual vertices (or edges) in a network in terms of the fraction of shortest paths that pass through them. Since exact computation in large networks is prohibitively expensive, we present two efficient randomized algorithms for betweenness estimation. The algorithms are based on random sampling of shortest paths and offer probabilistic guarantees on the quality of the approximation. The first algorithm estimates the betweenness of all vertices (or edges): all approximate values are within an additive factor @math ??(0,1) from the real values, with probability at least @math 1-?. The second algorithm focuses on the top-K vertices (or edges) with highest betweenness and estimate their betweenness value to within a multiplicative factor @math ?, with probability at least @math 1-?. This is the first algorithm that can compute such approximation for the top-K vertices (or edges). By proving upper and lower bounds to the VC-dimension of a range set associated with the problem at hand, we can bound the sample size needed to achieve the desired approximations. We obtain sample sizes that are independent from the number of vertices in the network and only depend on a characteristic quantity that we call the vertex-diameter, that is the maximum number of vertices in a shortest path. In some cases, the sample size is completely independent from any quantitative property of the graph. An extensive experimental evaluation on real and artificial networks shows that our algorithms are significantly faster and much more scalable as the number of vertices grows than other algorithms with similar approximation guarantees. Measuring the relative importance of each vertex in a network is one of the most fundamental building blocks in network analysis. Among several importance measures, betweenness centrality, in particular, plays key roles in many real applications. Considerable effort has been made for developing algorithms for static settings. However, real networks today are highly dynamic and are evolving rapidly, and scalable dynamic methods that can instantly reflect graph changes into centrality values are required. In this paper, we present the first fully dynamic method for managing betweenness centrality of all vertices in a large dynamic network. Its main data structure is the weighted hyperedge representation of shortest paths called hypergraph sketch. We carefully design dynamic update procedure with theoretical accuracy guarantee. To accelerate updates, we further propose two auxiliary data structures called two-ball index and special-purpose reachability index. Experimental results using real networks demonstrate its high scalability and efficiency. In particular, it can reflect a graph change in less than a millisecond on average for a large-scale web graph with 106M vertices and 3.7B edges, which is several orders of magnitude larger than the limits of previous dynamic methods. Centrality metrics have shown to be highly correlated with the importance and loads of the nodes within the network traffic. In this work, we provide fast incremental algorithms for closeness centrality computation. Our algorithms efficiently compute the closeness centrality values upon changes in network topology, i.e., edge insertions and deletions. We show that the proposed techniques are efficient on many real-life networks, especially on small-world networks, which have a small diameter and spike-shaped shortest distance distribution. We experimentally validate the efficiency of our algorithms on large-scale networks and show that they can update the closeness centrality values of 1.2 million authors in the temporal DBLP-coauthorship network 460 times faster than it would take to recompute them from scratch. Centrality has revealed crucial for understanding the structural properties of complex relational networks. Centrality is also relevant for various spatial factors affecting human life and behaviors in cities. Here, we present a comprehensive study of centrality distributions over geographic networks of urban streets. Five different measures of centrality, namely degree, closeness, betweenness, straightness and information, are compared over 18 1-square-mile samples of different world cities. Samples are represented by primal geographic graphs, i.e., valued graphs defined by metric rather than topologic distance where intersections are turned into nodes and streets into edges. The spatial behavior of centrality indices over the networks is investigated graphically by means of color-coded maps. The results indicate that a spatial analysis, that we term multiple centrality assessment, grounded not on a single but on a set of different centrality indices, allows an extended comprehension of the city structur... The betweenness centrality of a vertex in a graph is a measure for the participation of the vertex in the shortest paths in the graph. The Betweenness centrality is widely used in network analyses. Especially in a social network, the recursive computation of the betweenness centralities of vertices is performed for the community detection and finding the influential user in the network. Since a social network graph is frequently updated, it is necessary to update the betweenness centrality efficiently. When a graph is changed, the betweenness centralities of all the vertices should be recomputed from scratch using all the vertices in the graph. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work that proposes an efficient algorithm which handles the update of the betweenness centralities of vertices in a graph. In this paper, we propose a method that efficiently reduces the search space by finding a candidate set of vertices whose betweenness centralities can be updated and computes their betweenness centeralities using candidate vertices only. As the cost of calculating the betweenness centrality mainly depends on the number of vertices to be considered, the proposed algorithm significantly reduces the cost of calculation. The proposed algorithm allows the transformation of an existing algorithm which does not consider the graph update. Experimental results on large real datasets show that the proposed algorithm speeds up the existing algorithm 2 to 2418 times depending on the dataset. A complex network can be modeled as a graph representing the ''who knows who'' relationship. In the context of graph theory for social networks, the notion of centrality is used to assess the relative importance of nodes in a given network topology. For example, in a network composed of large dense clusters connected through only a few links, the nodes involved in those links are particularly critical as far as the network survivability is concerned. This may also impact any application running on top of it. Such information can be exploited for various topological maintenance issues to prevent congestion and disruption. This can also be used offline to identify the most important actors in large social interaction graphs. Several forms of centrality have been proposed so far. Yet, they suffer from imperfections: initially designed for small social graphs, they are either of limited use (degree centrality), either incompatible in a distributed setting (e.g. random walk betweenness centrality). In this paper we introduce a novel form of centrality: the second order centrality which can be computed in a distributed manner. This provides locally each node with a value reflecting its relative criticity and relies on a random walk visiting the network in an unbiased fashion. To this end, each node records the time elapsed between visits of that random walk (called return time in the sequel) and computes the standard deviation (or second order moment) of such return times. The key point is that central nodes see regularly the random walk compared to other topology nodes. Both through theoretical analysis and simulation, we show that the standard deviation can be used to accurately identify critical nodes as well as to globally characterize graphs topology in a distributed way. We finally compare our proposal to well-known centralities to assess its competitivity. Betweenness centrality ranks the importance of nodes by their participation in all shortest paths of the network. Therefore computing exact betweenness values is impractical in large networks. For static networks, approximation based on randomly sampled paths has been shown to be significantly faster in practice. However, for dynamic networks, no approximation algorithm for betweenness centrality is known that improves on static recomputation. We address this deficit by proposing two incremental approximation algorithms (for weighted and unweighted connected graphs) which provide a provable guarantee on the absolute approximation error. Processing batches of edge insertions, our algorithms yield significant speedups up to a factor of 104 compared to restarting the approximation. This is enabled by investing memory to store and efficiently update shortest paths. As a building block, we also propose an asymptotically faster algorithm for updating the SSSP problem in unweighted graphs. Our experimental study shows that our algorithms are the first to make in-memory computation of a betweenness ranking practical for million-edge semi-dynamic networks. Moreover, our results show that the accuracy is even better than the theoretical guarantees in terms of absolute errors and the rank of nodes is well preserved, in particular for those with high betweenness. Centrality measures are widely used to identify leaders of covert networks. We study how a group of such leaders can avoid being detected by such measures. More concretely, we study the hardness of choosing a set of edges that can be added to the network in order to decrease the leaders' ranking according to two fundamental centrality measures, namely degree, and closeness. We prove that this problem is NP-complete for each measure. We then study how the leaders can construct a network from scratch, designed specifically for them to hide in disguise. We identify a network structure that not only guarantees to hide the leaders to a certain extent, but also allows them to spread their influence across the network. Analyzing networks requires complex algorithms to extract meaningful information. Centrality metrics have shown to be correlated with the importance and loads of the nodes in network traffic. Here, we are interested in the problem of centrality-based network management. The problem has many applications such as verifying the robustness of the networks and controlling or improving the entity dissemination. It can be defined as finding a small set of topological network modifications which yield a desired closeness centrality configuration. As a fundamental building block to tackle that problem, we propose incremental algorithms which efficiently update the closeness centrality values upon changes in network topology, i.e., edge insertions and deletions. Our algorithms are proven to be efficient on many real-life networks, especially on small-world networks, which have a small diameter and a spike-shaped shortest distance distribution. In addition to closeness centrality, they can also be a great arsenal for the shortest-path-based management and analysis of the networks. We experimentally validate the efficiency of our algorithms on large networks and show that they update the closeness centrality values of the temporal DBLP-coauthorship network of 1.2 million users 460 times faster than it would take to compute them from scratch. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work which can yield practical large-scale network management based on closeness centrality values. 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 approach the problem of computing geometric centralities, such as closeness [1] and harmonic centrality [2], on very large graphs; traditionally this task requires an all-pairs shortest-path computation in the exact case, or a number of breadth-first traversals for approximated computations, but these techniques yield very weak statistical guarantees on highly disconnected graphs. We rather assume that the graph is accessed in a semi-streaming fashion, that is, that adjacency lists are scanned almost sequentially, and that a very small amount of memory (in the order of a dozen bytes) per node is available in core memory. We leverage the newly discovered algorithms based on HyperLogLog counters [3], making it possible to approximate a number of geometric centralities at a very high speed and with high accuracy. While the application of similar algorithms for the approximation of closeness was attempted in the MapReduce [4] framework [5], our exploitation of HyperLogLog counters reduces exponentially the memory footprint, paving the way for in-core processing of networks with a hundred billion nodes using "just" 2TiB of RAM. Moreover, the computations we describe are inherently parallelizable, and scale linearly with the number of available cores. The concept of centrality is often invoked in social network analysis, and diverse indices have been proposed to measure it. This paper develops a unified framework for the measurement of centrality. All measures of centrality assess a node's involvement in the walk structure of a network. Measures vary along four key dimensions: type of nodal involvement assessed, type of walk considered, property of walk assessed, and choice of summary measure. If we cross-classify measures by type of nodal involvement (radial versus medial) and property of walk assessed (volume versus length), we obtain a four-fold polychotomization with one cell empty which mirrors Freeman's 1979 categorization. At a more substantive level, measures of centrality summarize a node's involvement in or contribution to the cohesiveness of the network. Radial measures in particular are reductions of pair-wise proximities cohesion to attributes of nodes or actors. The usefulness and interpretability of radial measures depend on the fit of the cohesion matrix to the one-dimensional model. In network terms, a network that is fit by a one-dimensional model has a core-periphery structure in which all nodes revolve more or less closely around a single core. This in turn implies that the network does not contain distinct cohesive subgroups. Thus, centrality is shown to be intimately connected with the cohesive subgroup structure of a network. Given a connected graph G = (V,E), the closeness centrality of a vertex v is defined as (n-1 w V d(v,w). This measure is widely used in the analysis of real-world complex networks, and the problem of selecting the k most central vertices has been deeply analysed in the last decade. However, this problem is computationally not easy, especially for large networks: in the first part of the paper, we prove that it is not solvable in time O(|E|^ 2-epsilon) on directed graphs, for any constant epsilon > 0, under reasonable complexity assumptions. Furthermore, we propose a new algorithm for selecting the k most central nodes in a graph: we experimentally show that this algorithm improves significantly both the textbook algorithm, which is based on computing the distance between all pairs of vertices, and the state of the art. For example, we are able to compute the top k nodes in few dozens of seconds in real-world networks with millions of nodes and edges. Finally, as a case study, we compute the 10 most central actors in the IMDB collaboration network, where two actors are linked if they played together in a movie, and in the Wikipedia citation network, which contains a directed edge from a page p to a page q if p contains a link to q. We study the response of complex networks subject to attacks on vertices and edges. Several existing complex network models as well as real-world networks of scientific collaborations and Internet traffic are numerically investigated, and the network performance is quantitatively measured by the average inverse geodesic length and the size of the largest connected subgraph. For each case of attacks on vertices and edges, four different attacking strategies are used: removals by the descending order of the degree and the betweenness centrality, calculated for either the initial network or the current network during the removal procedure. It is found that the removals by the recalculated degrees and betweenness centralities are often more harmful than the attack strategies based on the initial network, suggesting that the network structure changes as important vertices or edges are removed. Furthermore, the correlation between the betweenness centrality and the degree in complex networks is studied. Centrality measures, or at least popular interpretations of these measures, make implicit assumptions about the manner in which traffic flows through a network. For example, some measures count only geodesic paths, apparently assuming that whatever flows through the network only moves along the shortest possible paths. This paper lays out a typology of network flows based on two dimensions of variation, namely the kinds of trajectories that traffic may follow (geodesics, paths, trails, or walks) and the method of spread (broadcast, serial replication, or transfer). Measures of centrality are then matched to the kinds of flows that they are appropriate for. Simulations are used to examine the relationship between type of flow and the differential importance of nodes with respect to key measurements such as speed of reception of traffic and frequency of receiving traffic. It is shown that the off-the-shelf formulas for centrality measures are fully applicable only for the specific flow processes they are designed for, and that when they are applied to other flow processes they get the “wrong” answer. It is noted that the most commonly used centrality measures are not appropriate for most of the flows we are routinely interested in. A key claim made in this paper is that centrality measures can be regarded as generating expected values for certain kinds of node outcomes (such as speed and frequency of reception) given implicit models of how traffic flows, and that this provides a new and useful way of thinking about centrality. © 2004 Elsevier B.V. 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