Patent Application: US-201213660940-A

Abstract:
methods and apparatus for a new approach to the problem of finding communities in complex networks relating to a social definition of communities and percolation are disclosed . instead of partitioning the graph into separate subgraphs from top to bottom a local algorithm allows overlapping of communities . the performance of an algorithm on synthetic , randomly - generated graphs and real - world networks is used to benchmark this method against others . an heuristic is provided to generate a list of communities for networks using a local community finding algorithm . unlike diffusion based algorithms , the provided algorithm finds overlapping communities and provides a means to measure confidence in community structure . it features locality and low complexity for exploring the communities for a subset of network nodes , without the need for exploring the whole graph .

Description:
in the detailed description , a local algorithm according to the present invention based on percolation theory is described . then the local community finding is generalized to an algorithm to detect and explore community structure of a complex network . thereafter benchmarking is disclosed for the algorithm using different randomly generated networks and real world networks employed in the literature to estimate the performance of community finding algorithms in this section a social definition of communities is adopted , showing that percolation identifies communities of a given vertex compared to previous diffusion based algorithms . next , essentials and performance of the algorithm on er random graphs are illustrated . while other definitions provide important insight into partitioning of the graph , a more local approach is chosen herein . unlike cohesive community definitions , garton et . al . [ 8 ] define communities as follows . in social network analysis context , a group is an empirically - discovered structure . by examining the pattern of relationships among members of a population , groups emerge as highly interconnected sets of actors known as cliques and clusters . in network analytic language , they are densely - knit ( most possibilities exist ) and tightly - bounded , i . e ., most relevant ties stay within the defined network [ 18 - 20 ]. social network analysts then want to know who belongs to a group , as well as the types and patterns of relations that define and sustain such a group . note that this definition differs from pervious cohesive definitions used by newman and others that not only most relevant ties should stay within the community but also nodes should be highly interconnected . [ 19 ]. it also allows overlap between communities . this definition arises naturally in many biological , social or web networks that vertices with close functionality or interest form highly clustered communities . a vertex is connected to many other vertices within the community . in an embodiment of the present invention , bond percolation is used as a tool for vertices to explore and identify their structural neighborhood . percolation theory was first used to study the flow of fluids in porous media and introduced a new approach to problems usually dominated by diffusion theory . percolation theory has been used to describe randomness and disorder in the structure of the medium while diffusion processes ascribe random movements of agents in a deterministic structure . similar concepts have been used extensively in complex networks literature to model and analyze different phenomena in the network such as random walk and network robustness to node and edge failures . many of these nonlinear dynamic properties of complex networks undergo phase transition when subject to different factors that affect interactions of structure and movement of agents in the system . other community finding algorithms have extensively used diffusion processes and random walks to define betweenness and identify partitioning of a network into different communities . according to the present invention , a different approach , percolation theory , is used to identify a highly clustered group of vertices that have close ties to each other . diffusion based algorithms are based on the observation that edge betweenness [ 24 ] of edges at community boundaries are high since they enable communication between nodes in different communities . fig1 illustrates this concept where thickness of edges are proportional to shortest - path betweenness between all vertices in the network . it may be easily seen that while boundaries of cohesive communities are easily identified , it does not perform well in overlapping communities . instead of performing random walks , a percolation message is started from a node , constitutes the set of connected components and looks at the components when their size does not increase as percolation probability is increased , as shown in fig2 . fig1 d and fig1 e show how a distributed percolation search may return highly clustered nodes to a vertex where size of the nodes are proportional to the fraction of percolation messages returned . the random walk based algorithms may be viewed as randomized versions of breadth - first search while percolation method is a randomized version of depth - first search . review of a simple community model in random graphs shows the relationship between empirical social definitions and complex network analysis . a collection of highly clustered er graphs have been extensively used in the literature to analyze simple performance of community finding algorithms [ 9 , 12 , 15 ]. a random graph is a graph in which properties such as the number of graph vertices , graph edges , and connections between them are determined in some random way [ 2 ]. for many monotone - increasing properties of random graphs , graphs of a size slightly less than a certain threshold are very unlikely to have the property , whereas graphs with a few more graph edges are almost certain to have it . this is known as a phase transition or threshold phenomena . of particular interest is the size of the largest connected component of the graph . an er graph g ( n ; p ) is a random graph with n vertices where each pair of vertices has an edge between them with probability p , [ 5 , 6 ]. the existence of any two edges are independent events . consider a random er graph of size n , where each pair of vertices are connected with probability p 0 ( n ). this may be viewed as ( bond ) percolation on a complete graph with percolation probability of p 0 ( n ). erdos and reneyi [ 5 , 6 ] show that the connected components have interesting properties when p 0 ( n ) scale as p 0 ( n )∝ c / n . depending on c , following behaviors happen with probability one for large n : i . for c & lt ; 1 size of the largest connected component is θ ( log ( n )). ii . at phase transition and for c = 1 size of the largest connected component is θ ( n 2 / 3 ). iii . for c & gt ; 1 a giant component appears and has size θ ( n ). remark 1 : bond percolation on an er graph of g ( n ; p 0 ) with probability p p will result in an er graph of g ( n ; p 0 p p ) thus the critical percolation probability for a randomly generated graph with p 0 is given by p c = c /( p 0 n ) where c & gt ; 1 . below this probability , vertex i will belong to a connected component of maximum size θ ( log ( n )) and above the threshold the probability of almost all vertices belonging to a giant connected component is a constant , i . e . there is a path between any two randomly chosen pair of vertices with non vanishing constant probability for large n . for a vertex i define set s i p as the connected component i including vertex i when ( bond ) percolating with probability p . define the community with strength p of vertex i , c i p , as pair of ( j , m ) where j ∈ s i p for m iterations out of k iterations where m & gt ; k th . the question remaining is how a vertex i identifies its communities distinctively , i . e . what values of percolation strength p corresponds to distinguishable communities . returning to the definition of communities as sets of vertices with similar interest or topic and thus higher probability of connection , one may observe that communities will emerge as connected components when varying percolation probability . to illustrate this more consider a simple example of an er graph , g ( n , p 0 ) of size n with probability p 0 . a subset γ of nodes form a local community of size m , i . e . each pair of vertices are connected with probability p γ & gt ;& gt ; p 0 , as illustrated in fig3 . then , remark 2 : for large m and n and percolation threshold of c /( p 0 n )& gt ;& gt ; p c & gt ;& gt ; c /( p γ m ), probability of any two vertices i and j belonging to a connected component is one if they belong to γ and is vanishingly small otherwise . proof the proof follows directly from property ii since the percolation threshold is above the threshold for an er graph of γ and below the percolation threshold of a global er graph . this means that for any vertex i in γ , c i p is approximately γ for c /( p 0 n )& gt ; p & gt ; c /( p γ m ) and will include almost all vertices of g for p & gt ; c /( p 0 n ). the definition is now generalized to multiple overlapping and non overlapping communities and investigate the behavior of c i p in different cases . consider an er graph of size n with probability p 0 and two subgraphs , γ 1 and γ 2 of size m 1 and m 2 and connection probabilities p 1 & gt ;& gt ; p 0 and p 2 & gt ;& gt ; p 0 respectively . define critical percolation probabilities p ci = c /( p i m i ), i = 1 , 2 . looking at the connected components as the percolation probability is swept for both overlapping and non overlapping cases , is illustrated in fig4 a and fig4 b . for c /( p 0 n )& gt ; p p & gt ; max ( p c1 , p c2 ) the percolation probability is above subgraph percolation probabilities so using remark 2 almost all the vertices in each community are connected . now consider two cases : 1 . if γ 1 and γ 2 have overlaps then any two vertices within same subgraph are almost surely connected . so any two vertices in both the communities are connected almost surely . if starting percolation from a node in γ k , it will get back fraction qk of iterations from nodes in γ k , and naively fraction q1q2 of iterations from nodes in other community . 2 . if γ 1 and γ 2 are non - overlapping , the probability of getting from any node in γ k to any other node when percolating is a non vanishing constant qk . then the probability of getting from a node i in one community to a node j in another community is then 1 −( 1 − q 1 q 2 ) α where α is the expected number of edges between two community and in this model is approximately α = m 1 m 2 p 0 . so any two communities that have strong ties will also connect weakly were the strength depends roughly on number of edges between communities . the above analysis predicts that c i p will have phase transitions at critical probabilities corresponding to communities , which analysis provides a local way of distinguishing communities without any global information . the algorithm to find communities for each vertex involves sending a percolation message with percolation probability p p , forming c i pp for a range of p p and finding the abrupt change in the community size . 1 . vertex i sends a message with percolating probability p p with a unique id identifying iteration ; 2 . it records the responses and constitutes the set si pp of the vertices responded ; 3 . the above task is performed k times and constitutes set ci pp of all the vertices responding more than kth ; and 4 . ci pp is computed for a range of p p and the abrupt changes in c i pp are found at percolation probabilities of p pl defining community layer l with strength p pl as c i ppl . the above algorithm basically finds nodes with high clustering and strong ties with the source node , while diffusion algorithms try to identify edges with high betweenness and high flow of random walks to find boundaries of communities . fig1 compares diffusion - based algorithms and percolation - based algorithms . using percolation - based algorithms has many advantages over divisive and agglomerative algorithms introduced in the literature . the distributed and parallel nature of percolation search provides a means to locally explore communities for a particular node , called their structure neighborhood [ 16 ]. often in real - world networks communities are not cohesive and have overlaps , in which case diffusion - based approaches fail since there are no separate boundaries for communities to find . the algorithm according to the present invention explores communities and identifies vertices in overlap of communities . another property of interest in community structure is how strong a vertex belongs to a community and the level of confidence in community structure [ 21 ]. a percolation search may be shown to easily provide these statistics by observing fraction of returned messages from a particular vertex . fig1 illustrates the fundamental differences between diffusion - and percolation - based approaches . for a network with n vertices and m edges , other types of community finding algorithms may find community structure in o ( md log ( n )) [ 4 ] where d is the depth of community dendrogram . however , one needs to process the whole graph to capture community structure of a particular node . in the previous section we discussed a local and distributed algorithm to find communities of a single vertex . in this section we generalize this method to find the community structure of the graph , usually called community dendrogram . in this case the dendrogram is not a simple tree since communities may overlap . the first approach to create community structure is to define the non - symmetric distance d ( i , j ) between vertices as : then classical clustering approaches may be used on this distance matrix to find the partitioning of nodes into communities . [ 25 ]. since the local community finding algorithm finds major communities , taking advantage of this the present invention includes a global community finding algorithm that merges the individual vertex community finding results . this algorithm has several advantages over previously proposed algorithms . it is more robust since it merges the communities over several vertices . it allows overlap of communities and purge weak and insignificant communities automatically . for each community pair ( c 1 , c 2 ). we then have : n 1 , 2 =|{( i , m )|( i , m )∈ c 1 ,( i , m ′)∈ c 2 , m & gt ; 0 . 25 m1 , m ′& gt ; 0 . 25 m2 }| n 1 =|{( i , m )|( i , m )∈ c 1 ,( i , m ′)∉ c 2 , m & gt ; 0 . 25 m1 }|+|{( i , m )|( i , m )∈ c 1 ,( i , m ′)∈ c 2 , m & gt ; 0 . 25 m1 , m ′≦ 0 . 25 m2 }| n 2 =|{( i , m )|( i , m )∉ c 1 ,( i , m ′)∉ c 2 , m ′& gt ; 0 . 25 m2 }|+{( i , m )|( i , m )∉ c 1 ,( i , m ′)∉ c 2 , m ≦ 0 . 25 m1 , m ′& gt ; 0 . 25 m2 }| where m i is the number of times community i has been merged . the similarity measure , ψ 1 , 2 , is then defined as ( n 1 , 2 − ( n 1 + n 2 ))/( n 1 , 2 +( n 1 + n 2 )). 1 . for each vertex i in the network perform the local community finding algorithm to get different levels of communities c i ppl cor - responding to percolation probabilities p pl . normalize it by m = max ( m ) ∀( j , m )∈ c i ppl , j ≠ i . set ( i , m )=( i , 1 ). 2 . find the community pair c l and c k that have maximum similarity ψ max = max i , jψi , j . if ψ max & lt ; 1 / 3 go to 3 . 3 . merge community c l into c k and set m k = m k + m l to further benchmark an algorithm according to the present invention , the results with a number of randomly generated graphs and social and biological networks used to measure performance of previous community finding algorithms [ 9 , 12 , 15 ] are compared . an algorithm according to the present invention is applied to two sets of randomly generated graphs . to benchmark the algorithm a traditional synthetic er graph proposed in [ 9 ] is used . then an overlap model of randomly generated graphs is used to demonstrate the advantages of proposed algorithm compared to partitioning algorithms and in particular to the fast community finding algorithm proposed in [ 9 ]. a large number of graphs of size n = 128 . were generated and divided into 4 equal - sized communities of 32 vertices each . any two vertices within the same community is connected with probability p 1 and between different communities with probability p 0 . so that expected degree of vertices is 16 . the performance of the community finding algorithm to find the communities , for different values of intra - community edges was examined . fig5 shows the percentage of the vertices classified correctly for a range of intercommunity edges . the results are bench - marked with similar experiments with other algorithms . fig5 shows that proposed algorithm works as well as a gn algorithm for small number of average inter - community edges per vertex and works considerably better for large values of inter - community edges inasmuch as the gn algorithm fails to detect communities because the number of edges inside a community and the number of edges to outside of the community is close . the algorithm according to the present invention detects communities with less precision since edges to outside of the community are randomly distributed over the network while inside edges form a clustered set of vertices that are more interconnected . while the previous example benchmarks performance of a community finding algorithms on random graphs , often in practical networks communities are not well separated as modeled in the previous model , but rather real life communities have overlaps , i . e . some of the nodes have strong ties to more than one community . one of the advantages of proposed algorithm due to its localized approach is that it may correctly identify overlapping communities , while traditional partitioning algorithms partition overlap vertices into one of the communities . further enhancements of the gn algorithm propose to capture such behaviors by randomizing the partitioning steps [ 21 ]. considering a randomly - generated graph with 128 vertices , each random vertex has 2 random edges on average . two communities of size 37 exist where each node has on average 14 random edges inside the community . the two communities also have 5 nodes in common , as shown in fig6 a . both a gn fast community finding algorithm and percolation community finding algorithm were applied . the gn method partitions the common vertices into one of the communities , as shown in fig6 b , while the method according to the present invention identifies communities and includes overlapping vertices in both communities , as shown in fig6 c . using the method according to the present invention , only a few nodes are misclassified , while using the gn method several more nodes are misclassified . the local community finding algorithm according to the present invention has been applied to the zachary karate club network [ 22 ]. this undirected graph has been used extensively in previous literature [ 9 , 12 , 15 ] for algorithm benchmark . zachary recorded the contacts between members of a karate club over a period of time . during the study , after a fight between owner and trainer , the club eventually split in half . the original network and the partitioning after split is depicted in fig7 a . the local community finding algorithm according to the present invention was applied for three important nodes in the network . nodes 1 and 33 represent the administrator and instructor respectively , and node 34 represents a high degree node with close relations with node 33 , see fig7 . note that the notion of community used herein is different from that of [ 9 ] and hence the outcome is different . the algorithm according to the resent invention looks for closely connected nodes in a cluster . identified communities clearly have overlaps . the sizes of the nodes are proportional to their strength in the community . fig7 b shows the local community finding for node 1 . as expected , node 17 is singled out since it does not have strong ties to the community . fig7 c shows the local community finding result for the instructor . node 27 has been singled out of the community since it does not have strong social connections with the community . also , nodes 10 , 25 , 26 , 28 , 29 were singled out . fig7 d shows the community for node 34 and it shows that it also includes the administrator . note that although percolation probability is symmetrical , i . e . the probability of node i and j being in the same connected component , the inclusion in the community is not symmetrical and node 34 is not included in community of node 1 . the reason is that the community threshold is different for the two depending on network neighborhood . the community structure finding algorithm was also applied . seven overlapping communities were identified . fig8 shows the schematic of the relationship between detected communities . two major communities are represented in fig9 . again the sizes of the nodes represent their strengths in the community . the algorithm is able to identify the communities correctly and further identify the role and strength of each node in the community . several nodes are clearly in the overlap between the communities as they have weak ties with both communities . as expected , nodes 1 and 34 are in the both the communities because of their close social connections with both communities , and node 12 has been excluded from the administrator community because it only has a single connection to node 1 . in the present description , a new distributed algorithm for finding communities of a vertex in a localized fashion is disclosed . it exploits social definition of a community has highly interconnected set of vertices . the algorithm according to the present invention is generalized to achieve a list of the communities for a network . it is shown how this algorithm has superior performance over previous algorithms by allowing overlap between communities and robustness to network perturbations . the algorithm may be further optimized by taking advantage of the fact that strong nodes in a community have similar local communities , and so complexity of the algorithm may be reduced by removing this computational redundancy . 1 . starting from a set of seed nodes instead of a single node 2 . instead of defining a global and uniform percolation probability , each node i is assigned a weight between 0 and 1 as w i . each edge between nodes i and j may also be assigned a weight between 0 to 1 as w ij . then each node instead of passing the message with percolation probability p perc it passes the message with a probability as a function off f ( p perc , w i , w i , j ) for example it may be pperc * wi * wi , j 3 . nodes and links may have different types and each type may have a predefined weights . 4 . weights of different links may be trained and adjusted for a particular user depending on the usage pattern or concept . for example , for a user searching for biotechnology , weight of the nodes in other concepts like food industry could be reduced 5 . sweeping over percolation probability may be optimized by doing a quick search over this metric . 6 . result of the community findings may be used to adjust link and node weights the present invention has a broad scope of applicability to almost any collection of data . fig1 a depicts a generalized system flowchart of a generalized process according to the present invention . the flowchart includes forming the network , assigning different weights , and performing local community finding on the network . this process is refined by feedback to adjust weights and modify nodes based on query , community results and / or user feedback . fig1 b illustrates a system architecture reference model ; the system includes different layers . meta - data is imported from various operational information databases and is organized and processed into a meta - data repository . different information retrieval components are used to analyze the data for particular applications . customer and web services access an enterprise portal network with general interfaces to make queries and receive results processed by an information retrieval framework and refined information presentation framework . fig1 c illustrates a core architectural model according to the present invention wherein a meta - data repository consists of analyzed linked storage of different types of data as discussed with respect to the system architecture . different plug - ins may be used to interact with structural analysis engines to answer queries . a standard command / report api is used to access the system through web services . it may be applied to documents , such as papers , patents , fda clinical trials documents , product descriptions , news reports , market analyses , analyst reports , business reporting information , and any combination or permutation thereof . it may also be employed in applications for analysis of the world wide web , email and spam filtering . the present invention may also be applied to pattern detection in biological networks , such as transcription regulatory networks , social networks and communities , for example for military and homeland security applications . in a patent : finding landscape , the present invention may be used to analyze competitors and to monitor those competitors with a watchdog capability by flagging results of ongoing analyses of companies , concepts , and technologies . fig1 a illustrates a system flowchart for application to patent information . the results are refined by feeding back the user adjustments of results to a meta - data repository . fig1 b shows transaction flows prior to application of an algorithm according to the present invention . fig1 c shows transaction flow with application to landscape analysis of patents using an algorithm according to the present invention . the present invention also enables a user to browse through communities and fine - tune the results with a simple binary filter . in application to market analysis , the present invention may be used to provide a portfolio for different sections of the market in terms of competitors , technologies , latest news and technical papers and publications . gaps between communities , and hence opportunities not covered by competitors , may be discovered by examining inter - community relations . the present invention may be used to find the web neighborhood of a website , its impact and links and communities on the web . it may also be used to monitor the neighborhood change over time . the present invention also provides an email and spam filter by providing a method to reduce spam and deliver messages only from the people relevant to an address . recently the problem of unsolicited commercial email or spam has been identified as an ubiquitous problem with email . the present invention provides a more general framework of cybertrust which not only provides a solution to the spam problem , but also restricts email access to trusted individuals . a new distributed method may be based on percolation theory for identifying individual users local network trust in cyberspace using simple local interactions . recommendation and social connections are used in daily activities to identify trust and reliability . adopting the same social approach , percolative communication of email messages and limiting interactions to social contacts restricts communication to locally trusted overlapping of communities . the method according to the present invention further exploits the properties of social networks to construct a distributed web of trust based on a user &# 39 ; s personal email network to simultaneously prevent spam emails and emails from unwanted sources . the algorithm represents a new paradigm for email communication that proves superior to simple white - list / black - list approaches . the problem is not just spam , the problem is the user receiving email from the people the user doesn &# 39 ; t know . many people simply discard an email if it is not from their contact list or unless somebody introduces them through an email ( cc ). this notion of online recommendation may be generalized according to the present invention and made invisible and intuitive . the method according to the present invention may be combined with bayesian and text based filters . behind the implementing algorithm is the present invention of applying percolation to overlapping communities for a user . the header of the email is changed so that it includes current receiver ( to ) and final destination ( final - to ). then upon receiving an email , if the final destination is the user , it is delivered to the user &# 39 ; s inbox else if current destination is me and time to live of email is less than some threshold i forward it to people in my contact list with forwarding probability p . this probability is chosen by user and can define how the limited a user wants to define its email community . where sendmail ( finalto , from , to ) sends an email with a proper header for to , from and finalto . the algorithm according to the present invention may be implemented in a distributed fashion , or in a centralized fashion by emulating it in the mail server for large email providers . in one variation according to the present invention , the forwarding probability may be weighted as a function of the email traffic between a sender and the user for social networks , including dating and recreational activities , the present invention may be used to identify communities and relationship between communities using social interactions data and to find the best social connection with a group of people . with respect to biological networks like transcription regulatory networks , the present invention may be used to discover functional blueprints of a cellular system from large - scale and high - throughput sequence and experimental data and allowing complex intracellular processes . to be revealed . see http :// arxiv . org / abs / q - bio . mn / 0501039 ). the present invention may be used to mine genomic data and other data to correlate functional and structural with sequence data , for example . also according to the present invention , literature , patent , patient history , drug trial and other data may be mined to assist in providing diagnosis or prognosis for a disease in a patient . patterns and communities may be revealed by applying the present invention to homeland security data : finding certain patterns of groups and behaviors related to homeland security , communities with certain relevant characteristics may be identified . the present invention may be implemented with databases including relational databases , relational mappings , graph databases . for example , a wide variety of database products may be used with the present invention , such as : - mysql by mysql ab , bangardsgatan 8s - 753 20 uppsalasweden : sql from microsoft , richmond , wash . ; and oracle , oracle corp . 500 oracle parkway , redwood shores , calif . 94065 ; natural language processing tools may be used in conjunction with the present invention to provide , for example , text parsing . such tools include : webfountain : international business machines corporation new orchard road , armonk , n . y . ; 10504914 - 499 - 1900 ; engenium ,: engenium , dallas , tex . ; telcordia latent semantic indexing software ,: telcordia technologies , inc ., piscataway , n . j . ; general text parser : university of tennessee knoxville tenn . also , according to the present invention , graph visualization and layout tools may be employed for improving the quality of analysis , including : aisee : 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