Dense subgraphs of sparse graphs (communities), which appear in most real-world complex networks, play an important role in many contexts. Computing them however is generally expensive. We propose here a measure of similarities between vertices based on random walks which has several important advantages: it captures well the community structure in a network, it can be computed efficiently, and it can be used in an agglomerative algorithm to compute efficiently the community structure of a network. We propose such an algorithm, called Walktrap, which runs in time O(mn^2) and space O(n^2) in the worst case, and in time O(n^2log n) and space O(n^2) in most real-world cases (n and m are respectively the number of vertices and edges in the input graph). Extensive comparison tests show that our algorithm surpasses previously proposed ones concerning the quality of the obtained community structures and that it stands among the best ones concerning the running time.
Many algorithms to find community structures in graphs exist. Most of them result from very recent works, but this topic is related to the classical problem of that consists in splitting a graph into a given number of groups while minimizing the cost of the edge cut @cite_18 @cite_43 @cite_45 . However, these algorithms are not well suited to our case because they need the number of communities and their size as parameters. The recent interest in the domain has started with a new approach proposed by Girvan and Newman @cite_4 @cite_39 : the edges with the largest (number of shortest paths passing through an edge) are removed one by one in order to split hierarchically the graph into communities. This algorithm runs in time @math . Similar algorithms were proposed by Radicchi @cite_13 and by Fortunato @cite_34 . The first one uses a local quantity (the number of loops of a given length containing an edge) to choose the edges to remove and runs in time @math . The second one uses a more complex notion of information centrality that gives better results but poor performances in @math .
@cite_18 @cite_4 @cite_39 @cite_43 @cite_45 @cite_34 @cite_13
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We present a study of anonymized data capturing a month of high-level communication activities within the whole of the Microsoft Messenger instant-messaging system. We examine characteristics and patterns that emerge from the collective dynamics of large numbers of people, rather than the actions and characteristics of individuals. The dataset contains summary properties of 30 billion conversations among 240 million people. From the data, we construct a communication graph with 180 million nodes and 1.3 billion undirected edges, creating the largest social network constructed and analyzed to date. We report on multiple aspects of the dataset and synthesized graph. We find that the graph is well-connected and robust to node removal. We investigate on a planetary-scale the oft-cited report that people are separated by "six degrees of separation" and find that the average path length among Messenger users is 6.6. We find that people tend to communicate more with each other when they have similar age, language, and location, and that cross-gender conversations are both more frequent and of longer duration than conversations with the same gender. Let @math be a @math -regular triangle-free graph with @math edges. We present an algorithm which finds a cut in @math with at least @math edges in expectation, improving upon Shearer's classic result. In particular, this implies that any @math -regular triangle-free graph has a cut of at least this size, and thus, we obtain a new lower bound for the maximum number of edges in a bipartite subgraph of @math . Our algorithm is simpler than Shearer's classic algorithm and it can be interpreted as a very efficient randomised distributed (local) algorithm : each node needs to produce only one random bit, and the algorithm runs in one round. The randomised algorithm itself was discovered using computational techniques . We show that for any fixed @math , there exists a weighted neighbourhood graph @math such that there is a one-to-one correspondence between heavy cuts of @math and randomised local algorithms that find large cuts in any @math -regular input graph. This turns out to be a useful tool for analysing the existence of cuts in @math -regular graphs: we can compute the optimal cut of @math to attain a lower bound on the maximum cut size of any @math -regular triangle-free graph. Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to suggest an alternative to the widely used Times Cited criterion for analysing citation networks. The approach involves taking account of the natures of the papers that cite a given paper, so as to differentiate between papers that attract the same number of citations.Design methodology approach – ArticleRank is an algorithm that has been derived from Google's PageRank algorithm to measure the influence of journal articles. ArticleRank is applied to two datasets – a citation network based on an early paper on webometrics, and a self‐citation network based on the 19 most cited papers in the Journal of Documentation – using citation data taken from the Web of Knowledge database.Findings – ArticleRank values provide a different ranking of a set of papers from that provided by the corresponding Times Cited values, and overcomes the inability of the latter to differentiate between papers with the same numbers of citations. The difference in rankings between Times Cited ... Community structures are an important feature of many social, biological and technological networks. Here we study a variation on the method for detecting such communities proposed by Girvan and Newman and based on the idea of using centrality measures to define the community boundaries ( M. Girvan and M. E. J. Newman, Community structure in social and biological networks Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. USA 99, 7821-7826 (2002)). We develop an algorithm of hierarchical clustering that consists in finding and removing iteratively the edge with the highest information centrality. We test the algorithm on computer generated and real-world networks whose community structure is already known or has been studied by means of other methods. We show that our algorithm, although it runs to completion in a time O(n 4 ), is very effective especially when the communities are very mixed and hardly detectable by the other methods.