Statistical properties of corporate board and director networks

The boards of directors of the largest corporations of a country together with the directors form a dense bipartite network. The board network consists of boards connected through common directors. The director network is obtained taking the directors as nodes, and a membership in the same board as a link. These networks are involved in the decision making processes relevant to the macro-economy of a country. We present an extensive and comparative analysis of the statistical properties of the board network and the director network for the first 1000 US corporations ranked by revenue (Fortune 1000) in the year 1999 and for the corporations of the Italian Stock Market. We find several common statistical properties across the data sets, despite the fact that they refer to different years and countries. This suggests an underlying universal formation mechanism which is not captured in a satisfactory way by the existent network models. In particular we find that all the considered networks are Small Worlds, assortative, highly clustered and dominated by a giant component. Several other properties are examined. The presence of a lobby in a board, a feature relevant to decision making dynamics, turns out to be a macroscopic phenomenon in all the data sets.Received: 21 February 2004, Published online: 14 May 2004PACS: 87.23.Ge Dynamics of social systems - 89.65.-s Social and economic systems - 89.65.Gh Economics, econophysics, financial markets, business and management     

A Path-Based Distribution Measure for Network Comparison

As network data increases, it is more common than ever for researchers to analyze a set of networks rather than a single network and measure the difference between networks by developing a number of network comparison methods. Network comparison is able to quantify dissimilarity between networks by comparing the structural topological difference of networks. Here, we propose a kind of measures for network comparison based on the shortest path distribution combined with node centrality, capturing the global topological difference with local features. Based on the characterized path distributions, we define and compare network distance between networks to measure how dissimilar the two networks are, and the network entropy to characterize a typical network system. We find that the network distance is able to discriminate networks generated by different models. Combining more information on end nodes along a path can further amplify the dissimilarity of networks. The network entropy is able to detect tipping points in the evolution of synthetic networks. Extensive numerical simulations reveal the effectivity of the proposed measure in network reduction of multilayer networks, and identification of typical system states in temporal networks as well.     

Vertex centrality as a measure of information flow in Italian Corporate Board Networks

The aim of this article is to investigate the governance models of companies listed on the Italian Stock Exchange by using a network approach, which describes the interlinks between boards of directors. Following mainstream literature, I construct a weighted graph representing the listed companies (vertices) and their relationships (weighted edges), the Corporate Board Network; I then apply three different vertex centrality measures: degree, betweenness and flow betweenness. What emerges from the network construction and by applying the degree centrality is a structure with a large number of connections but not particularly dense, where the presence of a small number of highly connected nodes (hubs) is evident.Then I focus on betweenness and flow betweenness; indeed I expect that these centrality measures may give a representation of the intensity of the relationship between companies, capturing the volume of information flowing from one vertex to another. Finally, I investigate the possible scale-free structure of the network.     

Computing Influential Nodes Using the Nearest Neighborhood Trust Value and PageRank in Complex Networks

Computing influential nodes gets a lot of attention from many researchers for information spreading in complex networks. It has vast applications, such as viral marketing, social leader creation, rumor control, and opinion monitoring. The information-spreading ability of influential nodes is greater compared with other nodes in the network. Several researchers proposed centrality measures to compute the influential nodes in a complex network, such as degree, betweenness, closeness, semi-local centralities, and PageRank. These centrality methods are defined based on the local and/or global information of nodes in the network. However, due to their high time complexity, centrality measures based on the global information of nodes have become unsuitable for large-scale networks. Very few centrality measures exist that are based on the attributes between nodes and the structure of the network. We propose the nearest neighborhood trust PageRank (NTPR) based on the structural attributes of neighbors and nearest neighbors of nodes. We define the measure based on the degree ratio, the similarity between nodes, the trust values of neighbors, and the nearest neighbors. We computed the influential nodes in various real-world networks using the proposed centrality method. We found the maximum influence by using influential nodes with SIR and independent cascade methods. We also compare the maximum influence of our centrality measure with the existing basic centrality measures.     

Extracting hidden fluctuation patterns of Hang Seng stock index from network topologies

We present a model of complex network generated from Hang Seng index (HSI) of Hong Kong stock market, which encodes stock market relevant both interconnections and interactions between fluctuation patterns of HSI in the network topologies. In the network, the nodes (edges) represent all kinds of patterns of HSI fluctuation (their interconnections). Based on network topological statistic, we present efficient algorithms, measuring betweenness centrality (BC) and inverse participation ratio (IPR) of network adjacency matrix, for detecting topological important nodes. We have at least obtained three uniform nodes of topological importance, and find the three nodes, i.e. 18.7% nodes undertake 71.9% betweenness centrality and closely correlate other nodes. From these topological important nodes, we can extract hidden significant fluctuation patterns of HSI. We also find these patterns are independent the time intervals scales. The results contain important physical implication, i.e. the significant patterns play much more important roles in both information control and transport of stock market, and should be useful for us to more understand fluctuations regularity of stock market index. Moreover, we could conclude that Hong Kong stock market, rather than a random system, is statistically stable, by comparison to random networks.     

PageRank centrality for temporal networks

In this paper, we propose a new centrality measure for ranking the nodes and time layers of temporal networks simultaneously, referred to as the f-PageRank centrality. The f-PageRank values of nodes and time layers in temporal networks are obtained by solving the eigenvector of a multi-homogeneous map. The existence and uniqueness of the proposed centrality measure are also guaranteed by existing results, under some reasonable conditions. The numerical experiments on a synthetic temporal network and two real-world temporal networks (i.e., Email-Eu-core and CollegeMsg temporal networks) show that the proposed centrality outperforms some existing centrality measures.     

Identifying Influence of Nodes in Complex Networks with Coreness Centrality:Decreasing the Impact of Densely Local Connection

Ranking nodes by their spreading ability has been a fundamental issue related to many real applications,such as information and disease control,In the well-known coreness centrality measure,nodes' influence is ranked only by summing all neighbors' k-shell values while the effect of the topological connections among them on the nodes' spreading ability are ignored.In this work,we propose an improved coreness measure by decreasing the impact of densely local connections.Comparing the results from a series of susceptible-infected-recovered simulations on real networks,we show that our improved method can rank the nodes' spreading ability more accurately than other ranking measures such as k-shell,distance based method,mixed degree decomposition and coreness centrality method.     

Communities in Italian corporate networks

The community structure of two real-world financial networks, namely the board network and the ownership network of the firms of the Italian Stock Exchange, is analyzed by means of the maximum modularity approach. The main result is that both networks exhibit a strong community structure and, moreover, that the two structures overlap significantly. This is due to a number of reasons, including the existence of pyramidal groups and directors serving in several boards. Overall, this means that the “small world” of listed companies is actually split into well identifiable “continents” (i.e., the communities).     

Optimal navigation for characterizing the role of the nodes in complex networks

In this paper, we explore how the approach of optimal navigation (Cajueiro (2009) [33]) can be used to evaluate the centrality of a node and to characterize its role in a network. Using the subway network of Boston and the London rapid transit rail as proxies for complex networks, we show that the centrality measures inherited from the approach of optimal navigation may be considered if one desires to evaluate the centrality of the nodes using other pieces of information beyond the geometric properties of the network. Furthermore, evaluating the correlations between these inherited measures and classical measures of centralities such as the degree of a node and the characteristic path length of a node, we have found two classes of results. While for the London rapid transit rail, these inherited measures can be easily explained by these classical measures of centrality, for the Boston underground transportation system we have found nontrivial results.     

Empirical analysis of the worldwide maritime transportation network

In this paper we present an empirical study of the worldwide maritime transportation network (WMN) in which the nodes are ports and links are container liners connecting the ports. Using the different representations of network topology — the spaces L and P, we study the statistical properties of WMN including degree distribution, degree correlations, weight distribution, strength distribution, average shortest path length, line length distribution and centrality measures. We find that WMN is a small-world network with power law behavior. Important nodes are identified based on different centrality measures. Through analyzing weighted clustering coefficient and weighted average nearest neighbors degree, we reveal the hierarchy structure and rich-club phenomenon in the network.     

Rewiring dynamical networks with prescribed degree distribution for enhancing synchronizability

In this paper, we present an algorithm for enhancing synchronizability of dynamical networks with prescribed degree distribution. The algorithm takes an unweighted and undirected network as input and outputs a network with the same node-degree distribution and enhanced synchronization properties. The rewirings are based on the properties of the Laplacian of the connection graph, i.e., the eigenvectors corresponding to the second smallest and the largest eigenvalues of the Laplacian. A term proportional to the eigenvectors is adopted to choose potential edges for rewiring, provided that the node-degree distribution is preserved. The algorithm can be implemented on networks of any sizes as long as their eigenvalues and eigenvectors can be calculated with standard algorithms. The effectiveness of the proposed algorithm in enhancing the network synchronizability is revealed by numerical simulation on a number of sample networks including scale-free, Watts-Strogatz, and Erdo?s-Re?nyi graphs. Furthermore, a number of network's structural parameters such as node betweenness centrality, edge betweenness centrality, average path length, clustering coefficient, and degree assortativity are tracked as a function of optimization steps.     

Multiscale characterization of recurrence-based phase space networks constructed from time series

Recently, a framework for analyzing time series by constructing an associated complex network has attracted significant research interest. One of the advantages of the complex network method for studying time series is that complex network theory provides a tool to describe either important nodes, or structures that exist in the networks, at different topological scale. This can then provide distinct information for time series of different dynamical systems. In this paper, we systematically investigate the recurrence-based phase space network of order k that has previously been used to specify different types of dynamics in terms of the motif ranking from a different perspective. Globally, we find that the network size scales with different scale exponents and the degree distribution follows a quasi-symmetric bell shape around the value of 2k with different values of degree variance from periodic to chaotic Ro?ssler systems. Local network properties such as the vertex degree, the clustering coefficients and betweenness centrality are found to be sensitive to the local stability of the orbits and hence contain complementary information.     

Methods to find community based on edge centrality

Divisive algorithms are of great importance for community detection in complex networks. One algorithm proposed by Girvan and Newman (GN) based on an edge centrality named betweenness, is a typical representative of this field. Here we studied three edge centralities based on network topology, walks and paths respectively to quantify the relevance of each edge in a network, and proposed a divisive algorithm based on the rationale of GN algorithm for finding communities that removes edges iteratively according to the edge centrality values in a certain order. In addition, we gave a comparison analysis of these measures with the edge betweenness and information centrality. We found the principal difference among these measures in the partition procedure is that the edge centrality based on walks first removes the edge connected with a leaf vertex, but the others first delete the edge as a bridge between communities. It indicates that the edge centrality based on walks is harder to uncover communities than other edge centralities. We also tested these measures for community detection. The results showed that the edge information centrality outperforms other measures, the edge centrality based on walks obtains the worst results, and the edge betweenness gains better performance than the edge centrality based on network topology. We also discussed our method’s efficiency and found that the edge centrality based on walks has a high time complexity and is not suitable for large networks.     

基于层间相似性的时序网络节点重要性研究

时序网络可以更加准确地描述节点之间的交互顺序和交互关系.结合多层耦合网络分析法,本文提出了基于节点层间相似性的超邻接矩阵时序网络节点重要性识别方法,与经典的认为所有层间关系为常数不同,层间关系用节点的邻居拓扑重叠系数进行度量.Workspace和Enrons数据集上的结果显示:相比经典的方法,使用该方法得到的Kendall’sτ值在各时间层上的平均提高,最高为17.72%和12.44%,结果表明层间相似性的度量对于时序网络的节点重要性度量具有十分重要的意义.     

A centrality measure for communication ability in weighted network

This paper proposes a new node centrality measurement in a weighted network, the communication centrality, which is inspired by Hirsch’s h$h$-index. We investigated the properties of the communication centrality, and proved that the distribution of the communication centrality has the power-law upper tail in weighted scale-free networks. Relevant measures for node and network are discussed as extensions. A case study of a scientific collaboration network indicates that the communication centrality is different from other common centrality measures and other h$h$-type indexes. Communication centrality displays moderate correlation with other indexes, and contains a well-balanced mix of other centrality measures and cannot be replaced by any of them.     

A study of the Immune Epitope Database for some fungi species using network topological indices

In the last years, the encryption of system structure information with different network topological indices has been a very active field of research. In the present study, we assembled for the first time a complex network using data obtained from the Immune Epitope Database for fungi species, and we then considered the general topology, the node degree distribution, and the local structure of this network. We also calculated eight node centrality measures for the observed network and compared it with three theoretical models. In view of the results obtained, we may expect that the present approach can become a valuable tool to explore the complexity of this database, as well as for the storage, manipulation, comparison, and retrieval of information contained therein.     

Complex networks in climate dynamics

Complex network theory provides a powerful framework to statistically investigate the topology of local and non-local statistical interrelationships, i.e. teleconnections, in the climate system. Climate networks constructed from the same global climatological data set using the linear Pearson correlation coefficient or the nonlinear mutual information as a measure of dynamical similarity between regions, are compared systematically on local, mesoscopic and global topological scales. A high degree of similarity is observed on the local and mesoscopic topological scales for surface air temperature fields taken from AOGCM and reanalysis data sets. We find larger differences on the global scale, particularly in the betweenness centrality field. The global scale view on climate networks obtained using mutual information offers promising new perspectives for detecting network structures based on nonlinear physical processes in the climate system.     

微博双向“关注”网络节点中心性及传播 影响力的分析

根据新浪微博的实际数据, 建立了两个基于双向“关注”的用户关系网络, 通过分析网络拓扑统计特征, 发现二者均具有小世界、无标度特征. 通过对节点度、紧密度、介数和k-core 四个网络中心性指标进行实证分析, 发现节点度服从分段幂率分布; 介数相比其他中心性指标差异性最为显著; 两个网络均具有明显的层次性, 但不是所有度值大的节点核数也大; 全局范围内各中心性指标之间存在着较强的相关性, 但在度值较大的节点群这种相关性明显减弱. 此外, 借助基于传染病动力学的SIR信息传播模型来分析四种指标在刻画节点传播能力方面的差异性, 仿真结果表明, 选择具有不同中心性指标的初始传播节点, 对信息传播速度和范围均具有不同影响; 紧密度和k-core较其他指标可以更加准确地描述节点在信息传播中所处的网络核心位置, 这有助于识别信息传播拓扑网络中的关键节点.     

Scale-free network growth by ranking

Network growth is currently explained through mechanisms that rely on node prestige measures, such as degree or fitness. In many real networks, those who create and connect nodes do not know the prestige values of existing nodes but only their ranking by prestige. We propose a criterion of network growth that explicitly relies on the ranking of the nodes according to any prestige measure, be it topological or not. The resulting network has a scale-free degree distribution when the probability to link a target node is any power-law function of its rank, even when one has only partial information of node ranks. Our criterion may explain the frequency and robustness of scale-free degree distributions in real networks, as illustrated by the special case of the Web graph.     

Rethinking failure and attack tolerance assessment in complex networks

Studies have revealed that real complex networks are inherently vulnerable to the loss of high centrality nodes. These nodes are crucial to maintaining the network connectivity and are identified by classical measures, such as degree and betweenness centralities. Despite its significance, an assessment based solely on this vulnerability premise is misleading for the interpretation of the real state of the network concerning connectivity. As a matter of fact, some networks may be in a state of imminent fragmentation before such a condition is fully characterized by an analysis targeted solely on the centrally positioned nodes. This work aims at showing that, in fact, it is basically the global network configuration that is responsible for network fragmentation, as it may allow many other lower centrality nodes to seriously damage the network connectivity.