Many popular measures used in social network analysis, including centrality, are based on the random walk. The random walk is a model of a stochastic process where a node interacts with one other node at a time. However, the random walk may not be appropriate for modeling social phenomena, including epidemics and information diffusion, in which one node may interact with many others at the same time, for example, by broadcasting the virus or information to its neighbors. To produce meaningful results, social network analysis algorithms have to take into account the nature of interactions between the nodes. In this paper we classify dynamical processes as conservative and non-conservative and relate them to well-known measures of centrality used in network analysis: PageRank and Alpha-Centrality. We demonstrate, by ranking users in online social networks used for broadcasting information, that non-conservative Alpha-Centrality generally leads to a better agreement with an empirical ranking scheme than the conservative PageRank.
The interplay between structural properties of networks and the diffusion processes occurring on them contribute to their complexity. This has been realized by several researchers in the past. For example, @cite_24 @cite_10 emphasized that dynamical processes play an important role in characterizing the structure of complex networks. In @cite_24 they measure the quality of a network partition in terms of the statistical property of the dynamic process taking place in the network. In @cite_10 they study the different equilibrium properties of these processes. However, their works focus on what we call conservative processes: unbiased and biased random walks, discrete and continuous time random walks. In contrast, we also study non-conservative dynamical processes. We also relate these processes to centrality. Although the relationship of PageRank to random walk-type processes is well known, we explain how Alpha-Centrality is related to a type of a non-conservative process. We also carry out an empirical study of different centrality measures, unlike previous works.
@cite_24 @cite_10
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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. 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. Determining interrelatedness structure of various entities from multiple time series data is of significant interest to many areas. Knowledge of such a structure can aid in identifying cause and effect relationships, clustering of similar entities, identification of representative elements and model reduction. The majority of existing results are based on correlation based indices which effectively assume a static relationship between the time series data and are not suitable for detecting interrelatedness when the time series are dynamically related or when the time series involve loops. In this paper, a methodology for identifying the interrelatedness structure of dynamically related time series data is presented that also allows for the presence of loops in the connectivity structure. A linear dynamic graph model is presented where it is assumed that each time series data is the sum of an independent stochastic noise source and a dynamically weighted sum of other time series data. A link is assumed to be present between two time series if the weight of a time series, which is a linear time-invariant filter, is nonzero in the formation of the other. Reconstruction of the link connectivity structure under various scenarios is considered. It is shown that when the linear dynamic graph is allowed to admit non-causal weights, then the links structure can be recovered with the possibility of identifying spurious connections. However, it is shown that the spurious links remain local, where, a spurious link is restricted to be within one hop of a true link. Furthermore, strategies for exact reconstruction of the link structure when the weights are restricted to be causal are developed. The main tools for determining the network topology are based on variations of Wiener filtering. A significant insight provided by the article is that, in the class of network models considered in the paper, the Wiener filter estimating a stochastic process based on other processes remains local in the sense that the Wiener filter utilizes only measurements local to the node being estimated. motion of a random walker on heterogeneous complex networks. We find that the random walker is attracted toward nodes with larger degree and that the random walk motion is asymmetric. The asymmetry can be quantified with the random walk centrality, the matrix formulation of which is presented. As an interacting system, we consider the zero-range process on complex networks. We find that a structural heterogeneity can lead to a condensation phenomenon. These studies show that structural heterogeneity plays an important role in understanding the properties of dynamical systems.