In a dynamic social or biological environment, the interactions between the underlying actors can undergo large and systematic changes. The latent roles or membership of the actors as determined by these dynamic links will also exhibit rich temporal phenomena, assuming a distinct role at one point while leaning more towards a second role at an another point. To capture this dynamic mixed membership in rewiring networks, we propose a state space mixed membership stochastic blockmodel which embeds an actor into a latent space and track its mixed membership in the latent space across time . We derived efficient approximate learning and inference algorithms for our model, and applied the learned models to analyze a social network between monks , and a rewiring gene interaction network of Drosophila melanogaster collected during its full life cycle. In both cases, our model reveals interesting patterns of the dynamic roles of the actors.
In a dynamic social or biological environment, the interactions between the actors can undergo large and systematic changes. In this paper we propose a model-based approach to analyze what we will refer to as the dynamic tomography of such time-evolving networks. Our approach offers an intuitive but powerful tool to infer the semantic underpinnings of each actor, such as its social roles or biological functions, underlying the observed network topologies. Our model builds on earlier work on a mixed membership stochastic blockmodel for static networks, and the state-space model for tracking object trajectory. It overcomes a major limitation of many current network inference techniques, which assume that each actor plays a unique and invariant role that accounts for all its interactions with other actors; instead, our method models the role of each actor as a time-evolving mixed membership vector that allows actors to behave differently over time and carry out different roles/functions when interacting with different peers, which is closer to reality. We present an efficient algorithm for approximate inference and learning using our model; and we applied our model to analyze a social network between monks (i.e., the Sampson's network), a dynamic email communication network between the Enron employees, and a rewiring gene interaction network of fruit fly collected during its full life cycle. In all cases, our model reveals interesting patterns of the dynamic roles of the actors.
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underlying
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The latent roles or membership of the actors as determined by these dynamic links will also exhibit rich temporal phenomena, assuming a distinct role at one point while leaning more towards a second role at an another point. To capture this dynamic mixed membership in rewiring networks, we propose a state space
In this paper we propose a model-based approach to analyze what we will refer to as the dynamic tomography of such time-evolving networks. Our approach offers an intuitive but powerful tool to infer the semantic underpinnings of each actor, such as its social roles or biological functions, underlying the observed network topologies. Our model builds on earlier work on a
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which embeds an actor into a latent space and track its mixed membership in the latent space across time . We derived efficient approximate learning and inference algorithms for our model, and applied the learned models
for static networks, and the state-space model for tracking object trajectory. It overcomes a major limitation of many current network inference techniques, which assume that each actor plays a unique and invariant role that accounts for all its interactions with other actors; instead, our method models the role of each actor as a time-evolving mixed membership vector that allows actors to behave differently over time and carry out different roles/functions when interacting with different peers, which is closer to reality. We present an efficient algorithm for approximate inference and learning using our model; and we applied our model
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(i.e., the Sampson's network), a dynamic email communication network between the Enron employees,
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Drosophila melanogaster
fruit fly
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both
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