A genetic algorithm with local search strategy for improved detection of community structure

On the basis of modularity optimization, a genetic algorithm is proposed to detect community structure in networks by defining a local search operator. The local search operator emphasizes two features: one is that the connected nodes in a network should be located in the same community, while the other is “local selection” inspired by the mechanisms of efficient message delivery underlying the small‐world phenomenon. The results of community detection for some classic networks, such as Ucinet and Pajek networks, indicate that our algorithm achieves better community structure than other methodologies based on modularity optimization, such as the algorithms based on betweenness analysis, simulated annealing, or Tasgin and Bingol's genetic algorithm. © 2009 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Complexity, 2010     

Information dynamics algorithm for detecting communities in networks

The problem of community detection is relevant in many scientific disciplines, from social science to statistical physics. Given the impact of community detection in many areas, such as psychology and social sciences, we have addressed the issue of modifying existing well performing algorithms by incorporating elements of the domain application fields, i.e. domain-inspired. We have focused on a psychology and social network-inspired approach which may be useful for further strengthening the link between social network studies and mathematics of community detection. Here we introduce a community-detection algorithm derived from the van Dongen’s Markov Cluster algorithm (MCL) method [4] by considering networks’ nodes as agents capable to take decisions. In this framework we have introduced a memory factor to mimic a typical human behavior such as the oblivion effect. The method is based on information diffusion and it includes a non-linear processing phase. We test our method on two classical community benchmark and on computer generated networks with known community structure. Our approach has three important features: the capacity of detecting overlapping communities, the capability of identifying communities from an individual point of view and the fine tuning the community detectability with respect to prior knowledge of the data. Finally we discuss how to use a Shannon entropy measure for parameter estimation in complex networks.     

Structural heterogeneity mediates the effect of community structure on cooperation

Emergence of cooperation in evolutionary prisoner's dilemma game strongly depends on the topology of underlying interaction network. We explore this dependence using community networks with different levels of structural heterogeneity, which are generated by a tunable upper‐bound on the total number of links that any vertex can have. We study the effect of community structure on cooperation by analyzing a finite population analogue of the evolutionary replicator dynamics. We find that structural heterogeneity mediates the effect of community structure on cooperation. In the community networks with low level of structural heterogeneity, community structure has negative effect on cooperation. However, the positive effect of community structure on cooperation appears and enhances with increasing structural heterogeneity. Our work may be helpful for understanding the complexity of cooperative behaviors in social networks. © 2011 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Complexity, 2012     

Task‐performing dynamics in irregular,biomimetic networks

Understanding self‐organized collective dynamics—especially in sparsely connected, noisy, and imperfect networks—has important implications for designing and optimizing task‐performing technological systems as well as for deciphering biological structures and functions. We note that stomatal arrays on plant leaves might provide an ideal example of task‐performance in this context. Guided by observations of stomatal networks, we examined a simple model of task‐performing, collective dynamics that included state noise, spatial rule heterogeneity, dynamic modules, and network rewiring. Our results indicate that task‐performance in such networks can actually be enhanced by various kinds of spatial and temporal irregularity. © 2007 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Complexity 12: 14–21, 2007     

Mining social networks using wave propagation

With the development of modern technology(communication, transportation, etc.), many new social networks have formed and influenced our life. The research of mining these new social networks has been used in many aspects. But compared with traditional networks, these new social networks are usually very large. Due to the complexity of the latter, few model can be adapted to mine them effectively. In this paper, we try to mine these new social networks using Wave Propagation process and mainly discuss two applications of our model, solving Message Broadcasting problem and Rumor Spreading problem. Our model has the following advantages: (1) We can simulate the real networks message transmitting process in time since we include a time factor in our model. (2) Our Message Broadcasting algorithm can mine the underlying relationship of real networks and represent some clustering properties. (3) We also provide an algorithm to detect social network and find the rumor makers. Complexity analysis shows our algorithms are scalable for large social network and stable analysis proofs our algorithms are stable.     

Interacting neural networks and the emergence of social structure

The article describes a computational model for the simulation of the emergence of social structure or social order, respectively. The model is theoretically based on the theory of social typifying by Berger and Luckmann. It consists of interacting artificial actors (agents), which are represented by two neural networks, an action net, and a perception net. By mutually adjusting of their actions, the agents are able to constitute a self‐organized social order in dependency of their personal characteristics and certain features of their environment. A fictitious example demonstrates the applicability of the model to problems of extra‐terrestrial robotics. © 2007 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Complexity 12: 41–52, 2007     

Clifford algebra method for network expression,computation, and algorithm construction

Clifford algebra is introduced as a theoretical foundation for network topology expression and algorithm construction. Network nodes are coded with basis vectors in a vector space , and the edges and k‐walk routes can be expressed by 2‐blades and k‐blades, respectively, in the Clifford algebra Cl(n,0). The topologies among nodes, edges, and routes of networks can be directly calculated, and the network routes can be extended and traversed with oriented join products. The network algorithm construction processes based on Clifford algebra are instantiated by the single source shortest path algorithm. The experimental results on different scale random networks suggest that Clifford algebra is suited for network expression and relation computation. The Clifford algebra‐based shortest path algorithm is vivid and clear in geometric meaning and has great advantage on temporal and spatial complexity. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Exploring express delivery networks in China based on complex network theory

Based on the complex network theory, we explore an express delivery system in China, which consists of two delivery networks, namely, the air delivery network (ADN) and the ground delivery network (GDN). Systematic structural analysis indicates that both delivery networks exhibit small‐world phenomenon, disassortative mixing behavior, and rich‐club phenomenon. However, there are significant differences between ADN and GDN in terms of degree distribution property and community structure. On the basis of the Barabási‐Albert model, we have proposed a network model incorporating the structural features of the two delivery networks to reveal their evolutionary mechanisms. Lastly, the parcel strength and the distance strength are analyzed, which, respectively, reflect the number of parcels and the long‐haul delivery distance handled by a node city. The strengths are highly heterogeneous in both delivery networks and have intense correlations with topological structures. These works are beneficial for express enterprises to construct or extend their express delivery networks, and provide some useful insights on improving parcel delivery service. © 2014 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Complexity 21: 166–179, 2015     

A fast and efficient algorithm to identify clusters in networks

A characteristic feature of many relevant real life networks, like the WWW, Internet, transportation and communication networks, or even biological and social networks, is their clustering structure. We discuss in this paper a novel algorithm to identify cluster sets of densely interconnected nodes in a network. The algorithm is based on local information and therefore it is very fast with respect other proposed methods, while it keeps a similar performance in detecting the clusters.     

团队中枢节点的效率模型

集团性是社会网络的显著特征.团队作为一个小规模的社会网络,也存在网络结构的非均匀性以及中枢节点.在阐述团队网络的集团性和中枢节点导致网络的两面性等结构特征的基础上,运用小世界模型的局部效率和集聚系数等指标,建立了团队中枢节点的效率模型,并通过网络结构的调整(如加键和断键重连)研究了网络结构对中枢节点的效率的影响.     

Communicability graph and community structures in complex networks

We use the concept of the network communicability [E. Estrada, N. Hatano, Communicability in complex networks, Phys. Rev. E 77 (2008) 036111] to define communities in a complex network. The communities are defined as the cliques of a “communicability graph”, which has the same set of nodes as the complex network and links determined by the communicability function. Then, the problem of finding the network communities is transformed to an all-clique problem of the communicability graph. We discuss the efficiency of this algorithm of community detection. In addition, we extend here the concept of the communicability to account for the strength of the interactions between the nodes by using the concept of inverse temperature of the network. Finally, we develop an algorithm to manage the different degrees of overlapping between the communities in a complex network. We then analyze the USA airport network, for which we successfully detect two big communities of the eastern airports and of the western/central airports as well as two bridging central communities. In striking contrast, a well-known algorithm groups all but two of the continental airports into one community.     

The micromechanics of three‐dimensional collagen‐I gels

We study the micromechanics of collagen‐I gel with the goal of bridging the gap between theory and experiment in the study of biopolymer networks. Three‐dimensional images of fluorescently labeled collagen are obtained by confocal microscopy, and the network geometry is extracted using a 3D network skeletonization algorithm. Each fiber is modeled as an elastic beam that resists stretching and bending, and each crosslink is modeled as torsional spring. The stress–strain curves of networks at three different densities are compared with rheology measurements. The model shows good agreement with experiment, confirming that strain stiffening of collagen can be explained entirely by geometric realignment of the network, as opposed to entropic stiffening of individual fibers. The model also suggests that at small strains, crosslink deformation is the main contributer to network stiffness, whereas at large strains, fiber stretching dominates. As this modeling effort uses networks with realistic geometries, this analysis can ultimately serve as a tool for understanding how the mechanics of fibers and crosslinks at the microscopic level produce the macroscopic properties of the network. © 2010 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Complexity 16: 22‐28, 2011     

Prisoner's dilemma and clusters on small‐world networks

The structure of interaction plays an important role in the outcome of evolutionary games. This study investigates the evolution of stochastic strategies of the prisoner's dilemma played on structures ranging from lattices to small world networks. Strategies and payoffs are analyzed as a function of the network characteristics of the node they are playing on. Nodes with lattice‐like neighborhoods tend to perform better than the nodes modified during the rewiring process of the construction of the small‐world network. © 2007 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Complexity 12:22–36, 2006     

演化博弈与自组织合作

主要研究复杂网络上的演化博弈.首先研究具有社团结构的无标度网络上的演化囚徒困境博弈及Newman-Watts小世界网络中异质性对合作演化的影响.然后考察了在不同合作者和作弊者初始分布配置情况下,不同的初始比例条件对合作水平的影响,且在社会网络上研究了雪堆博弈中的合作演化.进一步地,讨论了网络拓扑和博弈动力学的共同演化问题和网络上演化囚徒困境中的强化学习问题.最后给出了复杂网络上演化博弈论的未来发展方向与应用前景.     

Discovery Through Gossip

We study randomized gossip‐based processes in dynamic networks that are motivated by information discovery in large‐scale distributed networks such as peer‐to‐peer and social networks. A well‐studied problem in peer‐to‐peer networks is resource discovery, where the goal for nodes (hosts with IP addresses) is to discover the IP addresses of all other hosts. Also, some of the recent work on self‐stabilization algorithms for P2P/overlay networks proceed via discovery of the complete network. In social networks, nodes (people) discover new nodes through exchanging contacts with their neighbors (friends). In both cases the discovery of new nodes changes the underlying network — new edges are added to the network — and the process continues in the changed network. Rigorously analyzing such dynamic (stochastic) processes in a continuously changing topology remains a challenging problem with obvious applications. This paper studies and analyzes two natural gossip‐based discovery processes. In the push discovery or triangulation process, each node repeatedly chooses two random neighbors and connects them (i.e., “pushes” their mutual information to each other). In the pull discovery process or the two‐hop walk, each node repeatedly requests or “pulls” a random contact from a random neighbor and connects itself to this two‐hop neighbor. Both processes are lightweight in the sense that the amortized work done per node is constant per round, local, and naturally robust due to the inherent randomized nature of gossip. Our main result is an almost‐tight analysis of the time taken for these two randomized processes to converge. We show that in any undirected n‐node graph both processes take rounds to connect every node to all other nodes with high probability, whereas is a lower bound. We also study the two‐hop walk in directed graphs, and show that it takes time with high probability, and that the worst‐case bound is tight for arbitrary directed graphs, whereas Ω(n²) is a lower bound for strongly connected directed graphs. A key technical challenge that we overcome in our work is the analysis of a randomized process that itself results in a constantly changing network leading to complicated dependencies in every round. We discuss implications of our results and their analysis to discovery problems in P2P networks as well as to evolution in social networks. © 2016 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Random Struct. Alg., 48, 565–587, 2016     

Organizational dynamic embeddedness and external shocks: The impact of financial and recession crises in strategic networks of the global pharmaceutical industry

We analyze the global pharmaceutical industry network using a unique database that covers strategic transactions (i.e., alliance, financing and acquisition collaborations) for the top 90 global pharmaceutical firms and their ego‐network partnerships totaling 4735 members during 1991–2012. The article explores insights on dynamic embeddedness analysis under network perturbations by exploring core and full networks' behavior during the global financial crisis of 2007–2008 and the subsequent global and Eurozone recessions of 2009–2012. We introduce and test literature grounded hypotheses as well as report network visualizations and nonparametric tests that reveal important discrepancies in both network types before and after the financial crisis offset. We observe that firms in core and full networks behave differently, with smaller top pharmaceutical firms of core networks particularly being affected by the crises, potentially due to a collaboration reduction with bigger top pharmaceuticals. On the other hand, big pharmaceuticals in full networks maintain their centrality position as a possible consequence of their strategic collaborations not only with other similarly sized firms but also due to their connections with subsidiaries and other private entities present in the total sample. Our results confirm the significant dynamicity reduction during financial crisis and recession periods for core and full networks, and highlight the importance that exogenous factors as well as network types play in centrality‐based dynamic longitudinal network analysis. © 2016 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Complexity 21: 602–621, 2016     

Detecting evolving patterns of self‐organizing networks by flow hierarchy measurement

Hierarchies occur widely in evolving self‐organizing ecological, biological, technological, and social networks, but detecting and comparing hierarchies is difficult. Here we present a metric and technique to quantitatively assess the extent to which self‐organizing directed networks exhibit a flow hierarchy. Flow hierarchy is a commonly observed but theoretically overlooked form of hierarchy in networks. We show that the ecological, neurobiological, economic, and information processing networks are generally more hierarchical than their comparable random networks. We further discovered that hierarchy degree has increased over the course of the evolution of Linux kernels. Taken together, our results suggest that hierarchy is a central organizing feature of real‐world evolving networks, and the measurement of hierarchy opens the way to understand the structural regimes and evolutionary patterns of self‐organizing networks. Our measurement technique makes it possible to objectively compare hierarchies of different networks and of different evolutionary stages of a single network, and compare evolving patterns of different networks. It can be applied to various complex systems, which can be represented as directed networks. © 2011 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Complexity, 2011     

Steady state analysis of balanced‐allocation routing

We compare the long‐term, steady‐state performance of a variant of the standard Dynamic Alternative Routing (DAR) technique commonly used in telephone and ATM networks, to the performance of a path‐selection algorithm based on the “balanced‐allocation” principle [Y. Azer, A. Z. Broder, A. R. Karlin, and E. Upfal, SIAM J Comput 29(1) (2000), 180–200; M. Mitzenmacher, Ph.D. Thesis, University of California, Berkeley, August 1996]; we refer to this new algorithm as the Balanced Dynamic Alternative Routing (BDAR) algorithm. While DAR checks alternative routes sequentially until available bandwidth is found, the BDAR algorithm compares and chooses the best among a small number of alternatives. We show that, at the expense of a minor increase in routing overhead, the BDAR algorithm gives a substantial improvement in network performance, in terms both of network congestion and of bandwidth requirement. © 2005 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Random Struct. Alg., 2005     

基于网络拓扑结构的重要节点发现算法

复杂网络中的重要节点发现在现实生活中有着广泛的应用价值。传统重要节点发现方法可分为局部发现和全局发现两类算法,全局发现算法中最具代表性的是特征向量中心性算法(Eigenvector Centrality, EC),EC算法将所有节点归为一个社区并利用邻居节点重要性反馈计算节点的影响力大小,具有较高的计算效率和识别精度。但是,EC算法忽略了网络的拓扑结构,未考虑到真实网络中节点所在社区的结构特征。为此,本文提出一种基于网络拓扑结构的可达中心性算法(Accessibility Centrality, AC),首先利用邻接矩阵作为反馈路径,在反馈过程中计算不同路径下的节点整体影响力。同时,利用影响力传递过程中的噪音干扰特性,修正每一路径长度下节点整体影响力大小,最后利用修正结果得到AC值。为评估AC算法,本文利用两种传染病模型模拟节点影响力在四组真实网络中的传播过程,并引入其他四种算法进行对比验证。实验结果表明,与其他算法相比,AC算法可以更准确、有效地识别出有具有影响力的重要节点。     

On fuzzy cliques in fuzzy networks

A definition of fuzzy clique in social networks is suggested which overcomes five limitations of current definitions. This definition is based on the networks in which the 0–1 strengths, the weighted strengths, and fuzzy strengths are all allowed. The fuzzy distance in such a network is defined. The node‐clique and clique‐clique coefficients are suggested. The core and the periphery of fuzzy cliques are discussed formally. A “cone like” property of the cores is discovered. The network structures are discussed using the new definition. A “no circle” property of networks is found. Basic fuzzy tools and the related algorithms are also discussed. Some examples are analyzed to demonstrate the theory.