Luisa Cutillo1, Valeria Policastro2, Annamaria Carissimo2

Robustness in Weighted Networks

1 University of Leeds, UK

2 IAC, CNR, Naples, Italy

Networks in maths

Networks are mathematical representations of interactions among the components of a system and can be modelled by

graphs

  • Components: Nodes, Vertices
  • Interactions: Links, Edges
  • Systems: Network, Graph              
  • V
  • E
  • G=(V,E)              

Networks in maths

Networks are mathematical representations of interactions among the components of a system and can be modelled by

graphs

  • Components: Nodes, Vertices
  • Interactions: Links, Edges
  • Systems: Network, Graph              
  • V
  • E
  • w: E-->R
  • G=(V,E, w)   

Weighted Case

How to extract information out of a Network?

  • vertices can be divided in groups

  • nodes belonging to the same group are densely connected

  • number of edges between nodes of different groups is minimal

Community Extraction, i.e. Graph Partitioning

Community

structure!

Research Questions

  • communities of real world networks are not always defined objectively

  • they rarely have a unique community decomposition

  • which method to use?

  • computationally difficult task

  • number of communities, if any, is typically unknown

  • communities are often of unequal size and/or density

  • can we trust the recovered partition? Is it statistically significant?

Our Strategy for Weighted Networks

Null Model for Weighted Graphs

Weighted configuration model (WCM) presented in as null random model. An edge of weight w is drawn between two vertices i and j with probability:

 q(w) = pw(1 − p )

 

Perturbation strategy for Weighted Graphs

We propose to use a rewiring approach, which alters a specified number of edges using a series of Bernoulli trials to randomly rewire the network and determines the weight of the new edge between two nodes.

Results on LFN benchmark

and on a set of Real Datasets without ground truth

 

Walktrap most stable results!

Thanks!

References:

[1] Carissimo A., Cutillo L., De Feis I., (2017) Validation of community robustness. Computational Statistics and Data Analysis 120, 1-24
[2] Policastro, V., Righelli, D., Carissimo, A., Cutillo, L., De Feis, I. (2021) R Journal 13:1,292-309
[3] Garlaschelli D. (2009) New Journal of Physics. 11, 073005.
[4] Lancichinetti A., Fortunato S., Radicchi F. (2008) Benchmark graphs for testing community detection algorithms. PHYSICAL REVIEW E 78, 046110

 

IDSAI2023

By Luisa Cutillo