Computer Communications and Networks

Series Editors
Jacek Rak
Department of Computer Communications, Faculty of Electronics,
Telecommunications and Informatics, Gdansk University of Technology,
Gdansk, Poland
A. J. Sammes
Cyber Security Centre, Faculty of Technology, De Montfort University,
Leicester, UK

The Computer Communications and Networks series is a range of

textbooks, monographs and handbooks. It sets out to provide students,
researchers, and non-specialists alike with a sure grounding in current
knowledge, together with comprehensible access to the latest developments
in computer communications and networking.

Emphasis is placed on clear and explanatory styles that support a tutorial

approach, so that even the most complex of topics is presented in a lucid and
intelligible manner.

More information about this series at http://www.springer.com/series/4198

Krishna Raj P. M., Ankith Mohan and K. G. Srinivasa

Practical Social Network Analysis with Python

../images/462433_1_En_BookFrontmatter_Figa_HTML.gif

Krishna Raj P. M.
Department of ISE, Ramaiah Institute of Technology, Bangalore, Karnataka,
India
Ankith Mohan
Department of ISE, Ramaiah Institute of Technology, Bangalore, Karnataka,
India
K. G. Srinivasa
Department of Information Technology, C.B.P. Government Engineering
College, Jaffarpur, Delhi, India
Additional material to this book can be downloaded from http://extras.
springer.com .

ISSN 1617-7975e-ISSN 2197-8433

Computer Communications and Networks
ISBN 978-3-319-96745-5e-ISBN 978-3-319-96746-2
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-96746-2
Library of Congress Control Number: 2018949639
© Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2018
This work is subject to copyright. All rights are reserved by the Publisher,
whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights
of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting,
reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission
or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer
software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter
developed.
The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service
marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a
specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective
laws and regulations and therefore free for general use.
The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice
and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date
of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a
warranty, express or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or
for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains
neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and
institutional affiliations.

This Springer imprint is published by the registered company Springer

Nature Switzerland AG

The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham,

Switzerland

Preface

Although there are innumerable complex systems and therefore such a large
number of networks, the focus of this book is social networks . A social
network contains individuals as nodes and links representing the relationship
between these individuals. The study of social networks is of particular
interest because it focuses on this abstract view of human relationships
which gives insight into various kinds of social relationships ranging all the
way from bargaining power to psychological health.

We describe in detail graph theory, statistical properties and graph

algorithms. Through this, we hope to describe the various patterns and
statistical properties of networks, introduce design principles and models for
looking at these properties, provide an understanding as to why networks are
organized the way they are and apply our understanding to predict behaviour
of networks.

The world around us provides a plethora of instances of complex systems .

Transportation networks, social media applications, protein–protein
interactions, auction houses, spreading of diseases and so on are all
examples of complex systems we all encounter in our daily lives. All of
these systems are extremely complicated to comprehend because they
contain several seemingly disparate components which may be directly or
indirectly related to one another. These components exhibit behaviour which
is increasingly difficult to reason about and too risky to tinker with. Even a
slight seemingly innocuous change in one of the components can have a
domino effect which could have unexpected consequences.

Figure 1 depicts the Internet on a global scale. This figure can help paint a
sort of picture as to how complicated a system really is, and how one must
proceed in order to understand such a complex system.

../images/462433_1_En_BookFrontmatter_Fig1_HTML.jpg
Fig. 1

Illustration of the global Internet. Online at https://www.weforum.

org/projects/internet-for-all

Each of these complex systems (especially the Internet) has its own unique
idiosyncrasies but all of them share a particular commonality in the fact that
they can be described by an intricate wiring diagram, a network , which
defines the interactions between the components. We can never fully
understand the system unless we gain a full understanding of its network.

Network
A network is a collection of objects where some pairs of these objects are
connected by links. These objects are also sometimes referred to as nodes.
By representing a complex system through its network, we are able to better
visualize the system and observe the interconnections among the various
nodes. From close examination of networks, we can gather information
about which nodes are closely linked to one another, which are sparsely
linked, whether there is a concentration of links in a particular part of the
network, do some nodes have a very high number of links when compared
to others and so on.

Figure 2 illustrates network corresponding to the ARPANET in December

1970 (what the Internet was called then). It consisted of 13 sites where the
nodes represent computing hosts and links represent direct communication
lines between these hosts.

../images/462433_1_En_BookFrontmatter_Fig2_HTML.gif
Fig. 2

ARPANET in December 1970. Computing hosts are represented

as nodes and links denote the communication lines. Online at
https://imgur.com/gallery/Xk9MP

Graph
Several properties can be retrieved from these networks but there are some
others which require a more mathematical approach. In the purview of
mathematics, networks in its current state fail to be amenable. To allow for
this amenability, a network is represented as a graph . In this view, a graph
can be described as a mathematical representation of networks which acts as
a framework for reasoning about numerous concepts. More formally, a
graph can be defined as $$ G(V,E) $$ where $$ V $$ denotes the set of
all vertices of $$ G $$ and $$ E $$ denotes the set of edges of $$ G $$
. Each edge $$ e = (u,v) \in E $$ where $$ u,v \in V $$ describes an
edge from $$ u $$ to $$ v $$ . If an edge exists between $$ u $$ and
$$ v $$ then they are considered as neighbours . The number of vertices in
$$ G $$ is denoted as $$ |V| $$ and the number of edges is denoted by
$$ |E| $$ . These notations will be used throughout the book.

Figure 3 represents the graph corresponding to the network in Fig. 2 where

the vertices of the graph correspond to the computing hosts and the edges
correspond to the linking communication lines.

../images/462433_1_En_BookFrontmatter_Fig3_HTML.gif
Fig. 3

Graph corresponding to Fig. 2 consisting of 13 vertices and 17

edges

Organization of the Book

We reason about each graph and therefore its networks in the following
manner. First, we study the data therein and use it to find organizational
principles that help measure and quantify networks. Second, using graph
theory and statistical models, we attempt to understand behaviours and
distinguish surprising from expected phenomena. Finally, we apply graph
algorithms to analyse the graphs representing the networks.

Although there are innumerable complex systems and therefore such a large
number of networks, the focus of this book is social networks . A social
network contains individuals as nodes and links representing the relationship
between these individuals. The study of social networks is of particular
interest because it focuses on this abstract view of human relationships
which gives insight into various kinds of social relationships ranging all the
way from bargaining power to psychological health.

Completeness of a network is important in this study of online social

networks because unlike other offline and certain online networks, the
members of online social networks are not controlled random samples and
instead are biased samples.
In this book, we follow the possible convention: a complex system has
components interconnected by interactions, a network consists of nodes with
links representing connections and a graph contains vertices with connecting
edges. Wherever possible, we will try to stick to this convention but these
terms may be used interchangeably.

We describe in detail graph theory, statistical properties and graph

algorithms. Through this, we hope to accomplish the following goals:
Describe the various patterns and statistical properties of networks,
introduce design principles and models for looking at these properties,
provide an understanding as to why networks are organized the way they
are, and apply our understanding to predict behaviour of networks.

Network Datasets
In this age of information technology, we are blessed with an ever increasing
availability of large and detailed network datasets. These datasets generally
fall into one or more of the following groups.

Collaboration graphs : Collaboration graphs show the collaborators as

vertices and an edge between vertices indicating a collaboration
between the corresponding collaborators. Co-authorship among
scientists, co-appearances in movies among performers and Wikipedia
collaboration networks are all instances of collaboration graphs.

Who-talks-to-whom graphs : These graphs have conversers as vertices

and an edge between a pair of them if they have shared a conversation.
Phone call logs, e-mail logs, SMS logs and social media message logs
are examples of who-talks-to-whom graphs. However, these graphs
have a certain amount of regulation with it because it involves private
information that can be accessed. Certain privacy concerns must be
resolved before these graphs can be subject to any form of analysis.

A variant of these graphs are a “Who-transacts-with-whom graphs”

where the nodes represent individuals and edges denote a transaction
between individuals. These graphs are of particular interest to
economists.
 Information Linkage graphs : The Web is an example of these graphs
where the webpages denote the vertices and a hyperlink between
webpages are represented by edges. Such graphs which contain a large
amount of information in both the vertices and the edges, whose
manipulation is a task per se connotes information linkage graphs.

Technological graphs : In these graphs, physical devices such as routers

or substations represent the vertices and an edge represents a
communication line connecting these physical devices. Water grid,
power grid, etc. are examples of technological graphs.

There is a specific kind of technological graphs called the autonomous

systems (AS) graph where the vertices are autonomous systems and the
edges denote the data transfer between these systems. AS graphs are
special in that they have a two-level view. The first level is the direct
connection among components but there is a second level which
defines the protocol regulating the exchange of information between
communicating components. A graph of communication between
network devices controlled by different ISPs, transfer between bank
accounts, transfer of students between departments, etc. are all
instances of these AS graphs.

Natural-world graphs : Graphs pertaining to biology and other natural

sciences fall under this category. Food webs, brain, protein–protein
interactions, disease spread, etc. are natural-world graphs.

Krishna Raj P. M.
Ankith Mohan
K. G. Srinivasa
Bangalore, IndiaBangalore, IndiaJaffarpur, India

Contents

1 Basics of Graph Theory 1

1.1 Choice of Representation 1
1.1.1 Undirected Graphs 1
1.1.2 Directed Graphs 2
1.2 Degree of a Vertex 2
1.3 Degree Distribution 3
1.4 Average Degree of a Graph 3
1.5 Complete Graph 5
1.6 Regular Graph 6
1.7 Bipartite Graph 6
1.8 Graph Representation 7
1.8.1 Adjacency Matrix 7
1.8.2 Edge List 10
1.8.3 Adjacency List 10
1.9 Edge Attributes 11
1.9.1 Unweighted Graph 11
1.9.2 Weighted Graph 11
1.9.3 Self-looped Graph 13
1.9.4 Multigraphs 14
1.10 Path 15
1.11 Cycle 16
1.12 Path Length 16
1.13 Distance 16
1.14 Average Path Length 17
1.15 Diameter 17
1.16 Connectedness of Graphs 17
1.17 Clustering Coefficient 22
1.18 Average Clustering Coefficient 22
Problems 22
Reference 23
2 Graph Structure of the Web 25
2.1 Algorithms 26
2.1.1 Breadth First Search (BFS) Algorithm 26
2.1.2 Strongly Connected Components (SCC) Algorithm 27
2.1.3 Weakly Connected Components (WCC) Algorithm 28
2.2 First Set of Experiments—Degree Distributions 28
2.3 Second Set of Experiments—Connected Components 29
2.4 Third Set of Experiments—Number of Breadth First Searches 31
2.5 Rank Exponent 36
2.6 Out-Degree Exponent $$ \mathcal {O} $$ 38
2.7 Hop Plot Exponent $$ \mathcal {H} $$ 39
2.8 Eigen Exponent $$ \mathcal {E} $$ 42
Problems 43
References 44
3 Random Graph Models 45
3.1 Random Graphs 45
3.2 Erdös–Rényi Random Graph Model 45
3.2.1 Properties 49
3.2.2 Drawbacks of $$ G_{n,p} $$ 51
3.2.3 Advantages of $$ G_{n,p} $$ 51
3.3 Bollobás Configuration Model 51
3.4 Permutation Model 52
3.5 Random Graphs with Prescribed Degree Sequences 53
3.5.1 Switching Algorithm 53
3.5.2 Matching Algorithm 53
3.5.3 “Go with the Winners” Algorithm 54
3.5.4 Comparison 54
Problems 55
References 56
4 Small World Phenomena 57
4.1 Small World Experiment 57
4.2 Columbia Small World Study 62
4.3 Small World in Instant Messaging 65
4.4 Erdös Number 66
4.5 Bacon Number 66
4.6 Decentralized Search 67
4.7 Searchable 67
4.8 Other Small World Studies 67
4.9 Case Studies 68
4.9.1 HP Labs Email Network 68
4.9.2 LiveJournal Network 71
4.9.3 Human Wayfinding 76
4.10 Small World Models 79
4.10.1 Watts–Strogatz Model 79
4.10.2 Kleinberg Model 80
4.10.3 Destination Sampling Model 83
Problems 84
References 84
5 Graph Structure of Facebook 87
5.1 HyperANF Algorithm 88
5.2 Iterative Fringe Upper Bound (iFUB) Algorithm 89
5.3 Spid 89
5.4 Degree Distribution 90
5.5 Path Length 91
5.6 Component Size 91
5.7 Clustering Coefficient and Degeneracy 92
5.8 Friends-of-Friends 93
5.9 Degree Assortativity 94
5.10 Login Correlation 95
5.11 Other Mixing Patterns 95
5.11.1 Age 95
5.11.2 Gender 96
5.11.3 Country of Origin 96
Problems 99
References 100
6 Peer-To-Peer Networks 101
6.1 Chord 102
6.2 Freenet 103
Problems 106
References 107
7 Signed Networks 109
7.1 Theory of Structural Balance 109
7.2 Theory of Status 114
7.3 Conflict Between the Theory of Balance and Status 114
7.4 Trust in a Network 121
7.4.1 Atomic Propagations 122
7.4.2 Propagation of Distrust 122
7.4.3 Iterative Propagation 123
7.4.4 Rounding 123
7.5 Perception of User Evaluation 125
7.6 Effect of Status and Similarity on User Evaluation 129
7.6.1 Effect of Similarity on Evaluation 130
7.6.2 Effect of Status on Evaluation 132
7.6.3 Aggregate User Evaluation 134
7.6.4 Ballot-Blind Prediction 135
7.7 Predicting Positive and Negative Links 138
7.7.1 Predicting Edge Sign 139
Problems 143
References 144
8 Cascading in Social Networks 145
8.1 Decision Based Models of Cascade 145
8.1.1 Collective Action 151
8.1.2 Cascade Capacity 151
8.1.3 Co-existence of Behaviours 152
8.1.4 Cascade Capacity with Bilinguality 154
8.2 Probabilistic Models of Cascade 160
8.2.1 Branching Process 161
8.2.2 Basic Reproductive Number 161
8.2.3 SIR Epidemic Model 164
8.2.4 SIS Epidemic Model 164
8.2.5 SIRS Epidemic Model 165
8.2.6 Transient Contact Network 165
8.3 Cascading in Twitter 166
Problems 169
References 171
9 Influence Maximisation 173
9.1 Viral Marketing 173
9.2 Approximation Algorithm for Influential Identification 178
References 187
10 Outbreak Detection 189
10.1 Battle of the Water Sensor Networks 189
10.1.1 Expected Time of Detection ( $$ Z_{1} $$ ) 190
10.1.2 Expected Population Affected Prior to Detection ( $$ Z_{2} $$ )
190
10.1.3 Expected Consumption of Contaminated Water Prior to Detection (
$$ Z_{3} $$ ) 191
10.1.4 Detection Likelihood ( $$ Z_{4} $$ ) 192
10.1.5 Evaluation 192
10.2 Cost-Effective Lazy Forward Selection Algorithm 193
10.2.1 Blogspace 196
10.2.2 Water Networks 198
Problems 200
References 202
11 Power Law 203
11.1 Power Law Random Graph Models 205
11.1.1 Model A 205
11.1.2 Model B 206
11.1.3 Model C 206
11.1.4 Model D 207
11.2 Copying Model 207
11.3 Preferential Attachment Model 208
11.4 Analysis of Rich-Get-Richer Phenomenon 210
11.5 Modelling Burst of Activity 213
11.6 Densification Power Laws and Shrinking Diameters 214
11.7 Microscopic Evolution of Networks 221
11.7.1 Edge Destination Selection Process 221
11.7.2 Edge Initiation Process 226
11.7.3 Node Arrival Process 229
11.7.4 Network Evolution Model 230
Problems 231
References 231
12 Kronecker Graphs 233
12.1 Stochastic Kronecker Graph (SKG) Model 235
12.1.1 Fast Generation of SKGs 237
12.1.2 Noisy Stochastic Kronecker Graph (NSKG) Model 238
12.2 Distance-Dependent Kronecker Graph 239
12.3 KRONFIT 240
12.4 KRONEM 240
12.5 Multifractal Network Generator 242
References 242
13 Link Analysis 245
13.1 Search Engine 245
13.1.1 Crawling 246
13.1.2 Storage 248
13.1.3 Indexing 250
13.1.4 Ranking 251
13.2 Google 267
13.2.1 Data Structures 269
13.2.2 Crawling 270
13.2.3 Searching 270
13.3 Web Spam Pages 270
Problems 276
References 277
14 Community Detection 279
14.1 Strength of Weak Ties 279
14.1.1 Triadic Closure 279
14.2 Detecting Communities in a Network 282
14.2.1 Girvan-Newman Algorithm 283
14.2.2 Modularity 284
14.2.3 Minimum Cut Trees 288
14.3 Tie Strengths in Mobile Communication Network 291
14.4 Exact Betweenness Centrality 296
14.5 Approximate Betweenness Centrality 298
References 299
15 Representation Learning on Graphs 301
15.1 Node Embedding 302
15.1.1 Direct Encoding 303
15.1.2 Factorization-Based Approaches 303
15.1.3 Random Walk Approaches 304
15.2 Neighbourhood Autoencoder Methods 308
15.3 Neighbourhood Aggregation and Convolutional Encoders 309
15.4 Binary Classification 311
15.5 Multi-modal Graphs 311
15.5.1 Different Node and Edge Types 311
15.5.2 Node Embeddings Across Layers 312
15.6 Embedding Structural Roles 312
15.7 Embedding Subgraphs 313
15.7.1 Sum-Based Approaches 314
15.7.2 Graph-Coarsening Approaches 314
15.8 Graph Neural Networks 315
References 315
Index319
List of Figures

Fig. 1.1 An undirected graph comprising of $$ 4 $$ vertices $$ A $$ ,

$$ B $$ , $$ C $$ and $$ D $$ , and $$ 5 $$ edges, ( $$ A $$ ,
$$ B $$ ), ( $$ A $$ , $$ C $$ ), ( $$ A $$ , $$ D $$ ), ( $$ B $$
, $$ C $$ ), ( $$ B $$ , $$ D $$ ) 2

Fig. 1.2 A directed graph comprising of $$ 4 $$ vertices $$ A $$ ,

$$ B $$ , $$ C $$ and $$ D $$ , and $$ 5 $$ edges, ( $$ A $$ ,
$$ B $$ ), ( $$ A $$ , $$ C $$ ), ( $$ A $$ , $$ D $$ ), ( $$ B $$
, $$ C $$ ), ( $$ B $$ , $$ D $$ ) 2

Fig. 1.3 Histogram of $$ k $$ versus $$ P(k) $$ 4

Fig. 1.4 Scree plot of $$ k $$ versus $$ |V|_{k} $$ 4

Fig. 1.5 A complete undirected graph having $$ 20 $$ vertices and

$$ 190 $$ edges 5

Fig. 1.6 A complete directed graph having $$ 20 $$ vertices and

$$ 380 $$ edges 6

Fig. 1.7 A $$ 5 $$ -regular random graph on $$ 10 $$ vertices 7

Fig. 1.8 A folded undirected graph with its corresponding bipartite

undirected graph8

Fig. 1.9 A folded directed graph with its corresponding bipartite directed
graph9

Fig. 1.10 An undirected weighted graph with $$ 4 $$ vertices and

$$ 5 $$ weighted edges 12

Fig. 1.11 A directed weighted graph with $$ 4 $$ vertices and $$ 5 $$

weighted edges 12
Fig. 1.12 An undirected self-looped graph with $$ 4 $$ vertices and
$$ 9 $$ edges 13

Fig. 1.13 A directed self-looped graph with $$ 4 $$ vertices and $$ 9 $$

edges 13

Fig. 1.14 An undirected multigraph with $$ 4 $$ vertices and $$ 9 $$

edges 14

Fig. 1.15 A directed multigraph with $$ 4 $$ vertices and $$ 9 $$ edges

15

Fig. 1.16 A disconnected undirected graph with $$ 4 $$ vertices,

$$ A $$ , $$ B $$ , $$ C $$ and $$ D $$ , and $$ 2 $$ edges, (
$$ A $$ , $$ B $$ ), ( $$ B $$ , $$ C $$ ) leaving $$ D $$ as an
isolated vertex 18

Fig. 1.17 A strongly connected directed graph with $$ 4 $$ vertices,

$$ A $$ , $$ B $$ , $$ C $$ and $$ D $$ , and $$ 5 $$ edges, (
$$ A $$ , $$ B $$ ), ( $$ B $$ , $$ C $$ ), ( $$ C $$ , $$ A $$ ),
( $$ C $$ , $$ D $$ ) and ( $$ D $$ , $$ B $$ ) 18

Fig. 1.18 A weakly connected directed graph $$ G $$ with $$ 5 $$

vertices, $$ A $$ , $$ B $$ , $$ C $$ , $$ D $$ and $$ E $$ , with
$$ 6 $$ edges, ( $$ A $$ , $$ B $$ ), ( $$ B $$ , $$ C $$ ), (
$$ B $$ , $$ D $$ ), ( $$ C $$ , $$ A $$ ), ( $$ E $$ , $$ A $$ )
and ( $$ E $$ , $$ C $$ ). This graph has the SCCs, $$ E $$ ,
$$ A $$ , $$ B $$ , $$ C $$ and $$ D $$ 20

Fig. 1.19 A weakly connected graph whose vertices are the SCCs of
$$ G $$ and whose edges exist in $$ G^{\prime } $$ because there is an
edge between the corresponding SCCs in $$ G $$ 21

Fig. 1.20 A strongly connected directed graph where vertex $$ v $$

belongs to two SCCs $$ A $$ , $$ v $$ , $$ B $$ and $$ C $$ ,
$$ v $$ , $$ D $$ 21
Fig. 1.21 A graph with the same vertices and edges as shown in Fig. 1.19
with the exception that there exists an edge between $$ D $$ and
$$ E $$ to make the graph a strongly connected one 21

Fig. 2.1 In-degree distribution when only off-site edges are considered28

Fig. 2.2 In-degree distribution over May and October $$ 1999 $$ crawls
29

Fig. 2.3 Out-degree distribution when only off-site edges are considered29

Fig. 2.4 Out-degree distribution over May and October $$ 1999 $$ crawls
30

Fig. 2.5 Distribution of WCCs on the Web30

Fig. 2.6 Distribution of SCCs on the Web31

Fig. 2.7 Cumulative distribution on the number of nodes reached when BFS
is started from a random vertex and follows in-links32

Fig. 2.8 Cumulative distribution on the number of nodes reached when BFS
is started from a random vertex and follows out-links32

Fig. 2.9 Cumulative distribution on the number of nodes reached when BFS
is started from a random vertex and follows both in-links and out-links33

Fig. 2.10 In-degree distribution plotted as power law and Zipf distribution33

Fig. 2.11 Bowtie structure of the graph of the Web34

Fig. 2.12 Log-log plot of the out-degree $$ d_{v} $$ as a function of the

rank $$ r_{v} $$ in the sequence of decreasing out-degree for Int-11-97 36

Fig. 2.13 Log-log plot of the out-degree $$ d_{v} $$ as a function of the

rank $$ r_{v} $$ in the sequence of decreasing out-degree for Int-04-98
37
Fig. 2.14 Log-log plot of the out-degree $$ d_{v} $$ as a function of the
rank $$ r_{v} $$ in the sequence of decreasing out-degree for Int-12-98
37

Fig. 2.15 Log-log plot of the out-degree $$ d_{v} $$ as a function of the

rank $$ r_{v} $$ in the sequence of decreasing out-degree for Rout-95 37

Fig. 2.16 Log-log plot of frequency $$ f_{d} $$ versus the out-degree

$$ d $$ for Int-11-97 38

Fig. 2.17 Log-log plot of frequency $$ f_{d} $$ versus the out-degree

$$ d $$ for Int-04-98 38

Fig. 2.18 Log-log plot of frequency $$ f_{d} $$ versus the out-degree

$$ d $$ for Int-12-98 39

Fig. 2.19 Log-log plot of frequency $$ f_{d} $$ versus the out-degree

$$ d $$ for Rout-95 39

Fig. 2.20 Log-log plot of the number of pairs of nodes $$ P(h) $$ within
$$ h $$ hops versus the number of hops $$ h $$ for Int-11-97 40

Fig. 2.21 Log-log plot of the number of pairs of nodes $$ P(h) $$ within
$$ h $$ hops versus the number of hops $$ h $$ for Int-04-98 40

Fig. 2.22 Log-log plot of the number of pairs of nodes $$ P(h) $$ within
$$ h $$ hops versus the number of hops $$ h $$ for Int-12-98 40

Fig. 2.23 Log-log plot of the number of pairs of nodes $$ P(h) $$ within
$$ h $$ hops versus the number of hops $$ h $$ for Rout-95 41

Fig. 2.24 Log-log plot of the eigenvalues in decreasing order for Int-11-97
42

Fig. 2.25 Log-log plot of the eigenvalues in decreasing order for Int-04-98
42
Fig. 2.26 Log-log plot of the eigenvalues in decreasing order for Int-12-98
43

Fig. 2.27 Log-log plot of the eigenvalues in decreasing order for Rout-95 43

Fig. 3.1 Figure shows three undirected graph variants of 47

Fig. 3.2 Figure shows three directed graph variants of 47

Fig. 3.3 A random graph generated using Bollobás configuration model with

and 52

Fig. 4.1 Frequency distribution of the number of intermediaries required to

reach the target59

Fig. 4.2 Frequency distribution of the intermediate chains60

Fig. 4.3 Average per-step attrition rates (circles) and

confidence interval (triangles) 64
Fig. 4.4 Histogram representing the number of chains that are completed in

steps 64

Fig. 4.5 “Ideal” histogram of chain lengths in Fig. 4.4 by accounting for
message attrition in Fig. 4.364

Fig. 4.6 Distribution of shortest path lengths65

Fig. 4.7 A hand-drawn picture of a collaboration graph between various

researchers. Most prominent is Erdös66

Fig. 4.8 Email communication between employees of HP Lab69

Fig. 4.9 Degree distribution of HP Lab network69

Fig. 4.10 Probability of linking as a function of the hierarchical distance70

Fig. 4.11 Probability of linking as a function of the size of the smallest

organizational unit individuals belong to71

Fig. 4.12 Email communication mapped onto approximate physical location.

Each block represents a floor in a building. Blue lines represent far away
contacts while red ones represent nearby ones72

Fig. 4.13 Probability of two individuals corresponding by email as a

function of the distance between their cubicles. The inset shows how many
people in total sit at a given distance from one another72

Fig. 4.14 In-degree and out-degree distributions of the LiveJournal

network73
Fig. 4.15 In each of trials, a source

and target are chosen randomly; at each step, the message is forwarded

from the current message-holder to the friend of

geographically closest to . If

, then the chain is

considered to have failed. The fraction of pairs in which

the chain reaches ’s city in exactly steps is shown (

chains completed; median ,

, for

completed chains). (Inset) For completed,

median , ,

; if
 then picks a

random person in the same city as to pass the message to, and the
chain fails only if there is no such person available 74

Fig. 4.16 a For each distance , the proportion P( ) of

friendships among all pairs , of LiveJournal users with

is shown. The number of pairs

, with is estimated by
computing the distance between randomly
chosen pairs of people in the network. b The same data are plotted,

correcting for the background friendship probability: plot distance

versus 75

Fig. 4.17 The relationship between friendship probability and rank. The

probability of a link from a randomly chosen source

to the th closest node to , i.e, the node such that

, in the LiveJournal network,

averaged over independent source samples. A

link from to one of the nodes

, where the people in are all tied for rank

, is counted

as a ( ) fraction of a link for each of these ranks. As before, the

value of represents the background probability of a friendship

independent of geography. a Data for every th rank are shown. b

The data are averaged into buckets of size : for each

displayed rank , the average probability of a friendship over ranks

is shown. c and b The same data are replotted (unaveraged and averaged,
respectively), correcting for the background friendship probability: we plot

the rank versus

76
Fig. 4.18 Depiction of a regular network proceeding first to a small world

network and next to a random network as the randomness, increases

79

Fig. 4.19 Log of decentralized search time as a function of the exponent81

Fig. 5.1 Degree distribution of the global and US Facebook active users,
alongside its CCDF90

Fig. 5.2 Neighbourhood function showing the percentage of users that are

within hops of one another 91

Fig. 5.3 Distribution of component sizes on log–log scale92

Fig. 5.4 Clustering coefficient and degeneracy as a function of degree on

log–log scale93

Fig. 5.5 Average number of unique and non-unique friends-of-friends as a

function of degree93

Fig. 5.6 Average neighbour degree as a function of an individual’s degree,

and the conditional probability that a randomly

chosen neighbour of an individual with degree has degree 94

Fig. 5.7 Neighbor’s logins versus user’s logins to Facebook over a period of

days, and a user’s degree versus the number of days a user

logged into Facebook in the day period 95

Fig. 5.8 Distribution of ages for the

neighbours of users with age 96

Fig. 5.9 Normalized country adjacency matrix as a heatmap on a log scale.

Normalized by dividing each element of the adjacency matrix by the product
of the row country degree and column country degree97

Fig. 6.1 Abstract P2P network architecture102

Fig. 6.2 Degree distribution of the freenet network106

Fig. 7.1 , and are all friends of each other.

Therefore this triad ( ) by satisfying structural balance property is

balanced 110

Fig. 7.2 and are friends. However, both of them are enemies

of . Similar to Fig. 7.1, this triad ( ) is balanced 110

Fig. 7.3 is friends with and . However, and

are enemies. Therefore the triad ( ) by failing to satisfy

the structural balance property is unbalanced 110
Fig. 7.4 , and are all enemies of one another.

Similar to Fig. 7.3, the triad ( ) is unbalanced 111

Fig. 7.5 A balanced (left) and an unbalanced (right) graph111

Fig. 7.6 A signed graph112

Fig. 7.7 Supernodes of the graph in Fig. 7.6113

Fig. 7.8 A simplified labelling of the supernodes for the graph in Fig. 7.6113

Fig. 7.9 All contexts ( , ; ) where the red edge

closes the triad 116

Fig. 7.10 Surprise values and predictions based on the competing theories of
structural balance and status118

Fig. 7.11 Given that the first edge was of sign ,

gives the probability that reciprocated edge

is of sign 118

Fig. 7.12 Edge reciprocation in balanced and unbalanced triads. Triads :

number of balanced/unbalanced triads in the network where one of the edges
was reciprocated. P ( RSS ): probability that the reciprocated edge is of the

same sign. : probability that the positive

edge is later reciprocated with a plus. :

probability that the negative edge is reciprocated with a minus 119

Fig. 7.13 Prediction of the algorithms. Here,

$$ e^{*} = (0.4, 0.4, 0.1, 0.1) $$ , $$ K = 20 $$ 124

Fig. 7.14 Helpfulness ratio declines with the absolute value of a review’s
deviation from the computed star average. The line segments within the bars
indicate the median helpfulness ratio; the bars depict the helpfulness ratio’s
second and third quantiles. Grey bars indicate that the amount of data at that
$$ x $$ value represents $$ 0.1\% $$ or less of the data depicted in the
plot 126

Fig. 7.15 Helpfulness ratio as a function of a review’s signed deviation127

Fig. 7.16 As the variance of the star ratings of reviews for a particular
product increases, the median helpfulness ratio curve becomes two-humped
and the helpfulness ratio at signed deviation $$ 0 $$ (indicated in red) no
longer represents the unique global maximum 128
Fig. 7.17 Signed deviations vs. helpfulness ratio for variance = $$ 3 $$ , in
the Japanese (left) and U.S. (right) data. The curve for Japan has a
pronounced lean towards the left 128

Fig. 7.18 Probability of a positive evaluation ( $$ P(+) $$ ) as a function

of the similarity (binary cosine) between the evaluator and target edit vectors
( $$ s(e, t) $$ ) in Wikipedia 131

Fig. 7.19 Probability of $$ E $$ positively evaluating $$ T $$ as a

function of similarity in Stack Overflow 131

Fig. 7.20 Probability of $$ E $$ voting positively on $$ T $$ as a

function of $$ \Delta $$ for different levels of similarity in English
Wikipedia 132

Fig. 7.21 Probability of $$ E $$ voting positively on $$ T $$ as a

function of $$ \Delta $$ for different levels of similarity on Stack
Overflow for a all evaluators b no low status evaluators 133

Fig. 7.22 Similarity between $$ E $$ and $$ T $$ pairs as a function of

$$ \Delta $$ for a English Wikipedia and b Stack Overflow 133

Fig. 7.23 Probability of $$ E $$ positively evaluating $$ T $$ versus

$$ \sigma _{T} $$ for various fixed levels of $$ \Delta $$ in Stack
Overflow 134

Fig. 7.24 Dip in various datasets135

Fig. 7.25 The Delta-similarity half-plane. Votes in each quadrant are treated
as a group137

Fig. 7.26 Ballot-blind prediction results for a English Wikipedia b German

Wikipedia 138

Fig. 7.27 Accuracy of predicting the sign of an edge based on the signs of all
the other edges in the network in a Epinions, b Slashdot and c Wikipedia
141
Fig. 7.28 Accuracy of predicting the sign of an edge based on the signs of all
the other edges in the network in a Epinions, b Slashdot and c Wikipedia
142

Fig. 7.29 Accuracy for handwritten heuristics as a function of minimum

edge embeddedness143

Fig. 8.1 $$ v $$ must choose between behaviours $$ A $$ and $$ B $$

based on its neighbours behaviours 146

Fig. 8.2 Initial network where all nodes exhibit the behaviour $$ B $$ 147

Fig. 8.3 Nodes $$ v $$ and $$ w $$ are initial adopters of behaviour

$$ A $$ while all the other nodes still exhibit behaviour $$ B $$ 147

Fig. 8.4 First time step where $$ r $$ and $$ t $$ adopt behaviour

$$ A $$ by threshold rule 148

Fig. 8.5 Second time step where $$ s $$ and $$ u $$ adopt behaviour

$$ A $$ also by threshold rule 148

Fig. 8.6 Initial network where all nodes have behaviour $$ B $$ 149

Fig. 8.7 Nodes $$ 7 $$ and $$ 8 $$ are early adopters of behaviour

$$ A $$ while all the other nodes exhibit $$ B $$ 149

Fig. 8.8 After three time steps there are no further cascades150

Fig. 8.9 An infinite grid with $$ 9 $$ early adopters of behaviour

$$ A $$ while the others exhibit behaviour $$ B $$ 152

Fig. 8.10 The payoffs to node $$ w $$ on an infinite path with neighbours

exhibiting behaviour $$ A $$ and $$ B $$ 154

Fig. 8.11 By dividing the a-c plot based on the payoffs, we get the regions
corresponding to the different choices155
Fig. 8.12 The payoffs to node $$ w $$ on an infinite path with neighbours

exhibiting behaviour $$ AB $$ and 155

Fig. 8.13 The a-c plot shows the regions where chooses each of the
possible strategies 156

Fig. 8.14 The plot shows the four possible outcomes for how
spreads or fails to spread on the infinite path, indicated by this division of

the -plane into four regions 156

Fig. 8.15 Graphical method of finding the equilibrium point of a threshold

distribution157

Fig. 8.16 Contact network for branching process161

Fig. 8.17 Contact network for branching process where high infection
probability leads to widespread161

Fig. 8.18 Contact network for branching process where low infection
probability leads to the disappearance of the disease162
Fig. 8.19 Repeated application of

163

Fig. 8.20 A contact network where each edge has an associated period of
time denoting the time of contact between the connected vertices166

Fig. 8.21 Exposure curve for top hashtags 167

Fig. 9.1 Results for the linear threshold model181

Fig. 9.2 Results for the weight cascade model182

Fig. 9.3 Results for the independent cascade model with probability

182

Fig. 9.4 Results for the independent cascade model with probability

183
Fig. 10.1 (Left) Performance of CELF algorithm and off-line and on-line
bounds for PA objective function. (Right) Compares objective functions197

Fig. 10.2 Heuristic blog selection methods. (Left) unit cost model, (Right)
number of posts cost model197

Fig. 10.3 (Left) CELF with offline and online bounds for PA objective.
(Right) Different objective functions198

Fig. 10.4 Water network sensor placements: (Left) when optimizing PA,
sensors are concentrated in high population areas. (Right) when optimizing
DL, sensors are uniformly spread out199

Fig. 10.5 Solutions of CELF outperform heuristic approaches199

Fig. 11.1 A log-log plot exhibiting a power law204

Fig. 11.2 Distribution with a long tail210

Fig. 11.3 Burstiness of communities in the time graph of the Blogspace215

Fig. 11.4 Average out-degree over time. Increasing trend signifies that the
graph are densifying216

Fig. 11.5 Number of edges as a function of the number of nodes in log-log

scale. They obey the densification power law217

Fig. 11.6 Effective diameter over time for different datasets. There is
a consistent decrease of the diameter over time 215
Fig. 11.7 The fraction of nodes that are part of the giant connected

component over time. Observe that after years, of

all nodes in the graph belong to the giant component 219

Fig. 11.8 Probability of a new edge choosing a

destination at a node of degree 222

Fig. 11.9 Average number of edges created by a node of age 223

Fig. 11.10 Log-likelihood of an edge selecting its source and destination

node. Arrows denote at highest likelihood 224

Fig. 11.11 Number of edges $$ E_{h} $$ created to nodes $$ h $$ hops

away. $$ h = 0 $$ counts the number of edges that connected previously
disconnected components 226
Fig. 11.12 Probability of linking to a random node at $$ h $$ hops from
source node. Value at $$ h = 0 $$ hops is for edges that connect previously
disconnected components 227

Fig. 11.13 Exponentially distributed node lifetimes228

Fig. 11.14 Edge gap distribution for a node to obtain the second edge,
$$ \delta (1) $$ , and MLE power law with exponential cutoff fits 229

Fig. 11.15 Evolution of the $$ \alpha $$ and $$ \beta $$ parameters with

the current node degree $$ d $$ . $$ \alpha $$ remains constant, and
$$ \beta $$ linearly increases 230

Fig. 11.16 Number of nodes over time230

Fig. 12.1 Top: a “3-chain” and its Kronecker product with itself; each of the
$$ X_{i} $$ nodes gets expanded into $$ 3 $$ nodes, which are then
linked. Bottom: the corresponding adjacency matrices, along with the matrix
for the fourth Kronecker power $$ G_{4} $$ 234

Fig. 12.2 CIT-HEP-TH: Patterns from the real graph (top row), the
deterministic Kronecker graph with $$ K_{1} $$ being a star graph on
$$ 4 $$ nodes (center $$ +3 $$ satellites) (middle row), and the
Stochastic Kronecker graph ( $$ \alpha = 0.41 $$ , $$ \beta = 0.11 $$ -
bottom row). Static patterns: a is the PDF of degrees in the graph (log-log
scale), and b the distribution of eigenvalues (log-log scale). Temporal
patterns: c gives the effective diameter over time (linear-linear scale), and d
is the number of edges versus number of nodes over time (log-log scale) 236

Fig. 12.3 AS-ROUTEVIEWS: Real (top) versus Kronecker (bottom).

Columns a and b show the degree distribution and the scree plot. Columns c
shows the distribution of network values (principal eigenvector components,
sorted, versus rank) and d shows the hop-plot (the number of reachable pairs
$$ g(h) $$ within $$ h $$ hops or less, as a function of the number of
hops $$ h $$ 237
Fig. 12.4 Comparison of degree distributions for SKG and two noisy
variations238

Fig. 12.5 Schematic illustration of the multifractal graph generator. a The

construction of the link probability measure. Start from a symmetric
generating measure on the unit square defined by a set of probabilities
$$ p_{ij} = p_{ji} $$ associated to $$ m \times m $$ rectangles (shown
on the left). Here $$ m = 2 $$ , the length of the intervals defining the
rectangles is given by $$ l_{1} $$ and $$ l_{2} $$ respectively, and the
magnitude of the probabilities is indicated by both the height and the colour
of the corresponding boxes. The generating measure is iterated by
recursively multiplying each box with the generating measure itself as
shown in the middle and on the right, yielding $$ m^{k} \times m^{k} $$
boxes at iteration $$ k $$ . The variance of the height of the boxes
(corresponding to the probabilities associated to the rectangles) becomes
larger at each step, producing a surface which is getting rougher and
rougher, meanwhile the symmetry and the self similar nature of the
multifractal is preserved. b Drawing linking probabilities from the obtained
measure. Assign random coordinates in the unit interval to the nodes in the
graph, and link each node pair $$ I, J $$ with a probability given by the
probability measure at the corresponding coordinates 240

Fig. 12.6 A small network generated with the multifractal network generator.
a The generating measure (on the left) and the link probability measure (on
the right). The generating measure consists of $$ 3\times 3 $$ rectangles
for which the magnitude of the associated probabilities is indicated by the
colour. The number of iterations, $$ k $$ , is set to $$ k = 3 $$ , thus the
final link probability measure consists of $$ 27\times 27 $$ boxes, as
shown in the right panel. b A network with $$ 500 $$ nodes generated
from the link probability measure. The colours of the nodes were chosen as
follows. Each row in the final linking probability measure was assigned a
different colour, and the nodes were coloured according to their position in
the link probability measure. (Thus, nodes falling into the same row have the
same colour) 241

Fig. 13.1 Typical search engine architecture246

Fig. 13.2 Counting in-links to pages for the query “newspapers”253

Fig. 13.3 Finding good lists for the query “newspapers”: each page’s value
as a list is written as a number inside it254

Fig. 13.4 Re-weighting votes for the query “newspapers”: each of the
labelled page’s new score is equal to the sum of the values of all lists that
point to it255

Fig. 13.5 Re-weighting votes after normalizing for the query

“newspapers”256

Fig. 13.6 Limiting hub and authority values for the query “newspapers”257

Fig. 13.7 A collection of eight web pages260

Fig. 13.8 Equilibrium PageRank values for the network in Fig. 13.7261

Fig. 13.9 The same collection of eight pages, but $$ F $$ and $$ G $$

have changed their links to point to each other instead of to $$ A $$ .
Without a smoothing effect, all the PageRank would go to $$ F $$ and
$$ G $$ 262

Fig. 13.10 High level Google architecture268

Fig. 14.1 Undirected graph with four vertices and four edges. Vertices
$$ A $$ and $$ C $$ have a mutual contacts $$ B $$ and $$ D $$ ,
while $$ B $$ and $$ D $$ have mutual friend $$ A $$ and $$ C $$
280

Fig. 14.2 Figure 14.1 with an edge between $$ A $$ and $$ C $$ , and

$$ B $$ and $$ D $$ due to triadic closure property 280

Fig. 14.3 Graph with a local bridge between $$ B $$ and $$ E $$ 281

Fig. 14.4 Each edge of the graph in Fig 14.3 is labelled either as a strong
tie(S) or a weak tie(W). The labelling in the figure satisfies the Strong
Triadic Closure property281
Fig. 14.5 a Degree distribution. b Tie strength distribution. The blue line in
a and b correspond to $$P(x) = a(x+x_{0})^{-x}exp(-x/x_{c})$$ , where
x corresponds to either k or w . The parameter values for the fits in (A) are
$$k_{0}=10.9$$ , $$\gamma _{k}=8.4$$ , $$k_{c}=\infty $$ , and
for the fits in (B) are
$$w_{0}=280, \gamma _{w}=1.9, w_{c}=3.45\times 10.5$$ . c
Illustration of the overlap between two nodes, $$v_{i}$$ and $$v_{j}$$
, its value being shown for four local network configurations. d In the real
network, the overlap $$<O>_{w}$$ (blue circles) increases as a
function of cumulative tie strength $$P_{cum}(w)$$ , representing the
fraction of links with tie strength smaller than w . The dyadic hypothesis is
tested by randomly permuting the weights, which removes the coupling
between $$<O>_{w}$$ and w (red squares). The overlap
$$<O>_{b}$$ decreases as a function of cumulative link
betweenness centrality b (black diamonds) 293

Fig. 14.6 Each link represents mutual calls between the two users, and all
nodes are shown that are at distance less than six from the selected user,
marked by a circle in the center. a The real tie strengths, observed in the call
logs, defined as the aggregate call duration in minutes. b The dyadic
hypothesis suggests that the tie strength depends only on the relationship
between the two individuals. To illustrate the tie strength distribution in this
case, we randomly permuted tie strengths for the sample in a . c The weight
of the links assigned on the basis of their betweenness centrality
$$ b_{ij} $$ values for the sample in $$ A $$ as suggested by the global
efficiency principle. In this case, the links connecting communities have
high $$ b_{ij} $$ values (red), whereas the links within the communities
have low $$ b_{ij} $$ values (green) 294

Fig. 14.7 The control parameter f denotes the fraction of removed links. a
and c These graphs correspond to the case in which the links are removed on
the basis of their strengths ( $$w_{ij}$$ removal). b and d These graphs
correspond to the case in which the links were removed on the basis of their
overlap ( $$O_{ij}$$ removal). The black curves correspond to removing
first the high-strength (or high $$O_{ij}$$ ) links, moving toward the
weaker ones, whereas the red curves represent the opposite, starting with the
low-strength (or low $$O_{ij}$$ ) ties and moving toward the stronger
ones. a and b The relative size of the largest component
 $$R_{GC}(f)=N_{GC}(f)/N_{GC}(f=0)$$ indicates that the removal of
the low $$w_{ij}$$ or $$O_{ij}$$ links leads to a breakdown of the
network, whereas the removal of the high $$w_{ij}$$ or $$O_{ij}$$
links leads only to the network’s gradual shrinkage. a Inset Shown is the
blowup of the high $$w_{ij}$$ region, indicating that when the low
$$w_{ij}$$ ties are removed first, the red curve goes to zero at a finite f
value. c and d According to percolation theory,
$$\tilde{S}=\sum _{s<s_{max}}n_{s}s^{2}/N$$ diverges for

$$N\rightarrow \infty $$ as we approach the critical threshold ,

where the network falls apart. If we start link removal from links with low

( c ) or ( d ) values, we observe a clear signature

of divergence. In contrast, if we start with high $$w_{ij}$$ ( c ) or
$$O_{ij}$$ ( d ) links, there the divergence is absent 295

Fig. 14.8 The dynamics of spreading on the weighted mobile call graph,
assuming that the probability for a node $$ v_{i} $$ to pass on the
information to its neighbour $$ v_{j} $$ in one time step is given by
$$ P_{ij}=xw_{ij} $$ , with $$ x=2.59\times 10^{-4} $$ . a The
fraction of infected nodes as a function of time $$ t $$ . The blue curve
(circles) corresponds to spreading on the network with the real tie strengths,
whereas the black curve (asterisks) represents the control simulation, in
which all tie strengths are considered equal. b Number of infected nodes as a
function of time for a single realization of the spreading process. Each steep
part of the curve corresponds to invading a small community. The flatter part
indicates that the spreading becomes trapped within the community. c and d
Distribution of strengths of the links responsible for the first infection for a
node in the real network ( c ) and control simulation ( d ). e and f Spreading
in a small neighbourhood in the simulation using the real weights (E) or the
control case, in which all weights are taken to be equal ( f ). The infection in
all cases was released from the node marked in red, and the empirically
observed tie strength is shown as the thickness of the arrows (right-hand
scale). The simulation was repeated 1,000 times; the size of the arrowheads
is proportional to the number of times that information was passed in the
given direction, and the colour indicates the total number of transmissions
on that link (the numbers in the colour scale refer to percentages of
$$ 1,000 $$ ). The contours are guides to the eye, illustrating the
difference in the information direction flow in the two simulations 297

Fig. 15.1 a Graph of the Zachary Karate Club network where nodes
represent members and edges indicate friendship between members. b Two-
dimensional visualization of node embeddings generated from this graph
using the DeepWalk method. The distances between nodes in the embedding
space reflect proximity in the original graph, and the node embeddings are
spatially clustered according to the different colour-coded communities 306

Fig. 15.2 Graph of the Les Misérables novel where nodes represent
characters and edges indicate interaction at some point in the novel between
corresponding characters. (Left) Global positioning of the nodes. Same
colour indicates that the nodes belong to the same community. (Right)
Colour denotes structural equivalence between nodes, i.e, they play the same
roles in their local neighbourhoods. Blue nodes are the articulation points.
This equivalence where generated using the node2vec algorithm306

Fig. 15.3 Illustration of the neighbourhood aggregation methods. To

generate the embedding for a node, these methods first collect the node’s k-
hop neighbourhood. In the next step, these methods aggregate the attributes
of node’s neighbours, using neural network aggregators. This aggregated
neighbourhood information is used to generate an embedding, which is then
fed to the decoder309

List of Tables

Table 1.1 Table shows the vertices of the graph in Fig. 1.1 and their
corresponding degrees3
Table 1.2 Table shows the vertices of the graph in Fig. 1.2 and their
corresponding in-degrees, out-degrees and degrees3

Table 1.3 Adjacency list for the graph in Fig. 1.110

Table 1.4 Adjacency list for the graph in Fig. 1.210

Table 1.5 $$ In $$ and $$ Out $$ for all the vertices in Fig. 1.1 19

Table 1.6 $$ In $$ and $$ Out $$ for all the vertices in Fig. 1.2 19

Table 1.7 $$ In $$ and $$ Out $$ for all the vertices in Fig. 1.16 20

Table 1.8 $$ In $$ and $$ Out $$ for all the vertices in Fig. 1.17 20

Table 1.9 Clustering coefficient of vertices of Figs. 1.1 and 1.222

Table 2.1 Size of the largest surviving weak component when links to pages
with in-degree at least k are removed from the graph30

Table 2.2 Sizes of the components forming the bowtie34

Table 5.1 Countries with their codes98

Table 7.1 Dataset statistics115

Table 7.2 Dataset statistics115

Table 7.3 Wikipedia statistics. $$ N = $$ number of votes,

$$ P_{0}(+) $$ $$ = $$ baseline fraction of positive votes, $$ U = $$
number of users 129

Table 8.1 A-B coordination game payoff matrix146

Table 8.2 Coordination game for node specific payoffs150

Table 8.3 Payoff matrix153

Table 8.4 Symmetric payoff matrix157

Table 8.5 Symmetric payoff matrix parametrized by critical probability

$$ q $$ 158

Table 13.1 PageRank values of Fig. 13.7259

© Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2018
Krishna Raj P.M., Ankith Mohan and K.G. SrinivasaPractical Social
Network Analysis with PythonComputer Communications and
Networkshttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-96746-2_1

1. Basics of Graph Theory

Krishna Raj P. M.1 , Ankith Mohan1 and K. G. Srinivasa2
(1)
Department of ISE, Ramaiah Institute of Technology, Bangalore,
Karnataka, India
(2)
Department of Information Technology, C.B.P. Government Engineering
College, Jaffarpur, Delhi, India

Krishna Raj P. M.
Email: krishnarajpm@gmail.com

A graph can shed light on several properties of a complex system, but this
is incumbent on the effectiveness of the network. If the network does not
fully represent all the features described in the system, then the graph will
also fail to describe all the properties lying therein. Therefore, the choice of
a proper network representation of the complex system is of first
importance.

A network must be chosen in such a way that it weighs every component of

a system individually on its own merit. In some cases, there is a unique,
unambiguous representation. While in others, the representation is not
unique.

1.1 Choice of Representation

Undirected graphs and directed graphs are the most common choices for
representation of networks.
1.1.1 Undirected Graphs

A graph G(V, E) is said to be an undirected graph if every edge is

bidirectional, i.e, every edge is symmetrical and reciprocal. Therefore, an
edge e between u and v in G can be represented as $$e = (u,v)$$ or
$$e = (v,u)$$. Figure 1.1 depicts an undirected graph with 4 vertices
connected by 5 edges.

../images/462433_1_En_1_Chapter/462433_1_En_1_Fig1_HTML.
gif
Fig. 1.1

An undirected graph comprising of 4 vertices A, B, C and D, and

5 edges, (A,B), (A,C), (A,D), (B,C), (B,D)

Collaborations and friendships on social media applications are some of the

instances in the real-world that can be represented as undirected graphs.

1.1.2 Directed Graphs

A graph G(V, E) is said to be a directed graph if every edge is directional,

i.e, every edge is asymmetrical and non-reciprocal. An edge e from u to v
in G must be represented as $$e = (u,v)$$. Figure 1.2 represents a
directed graph with 4 vertices interconnected by 5 edges.

../images/462433_1_En_1_Chapter/462433_1_En_1_Fig2_HTML.
gif
Fig. 1.2

A directed graph comprising of 4 vertices A, B, C and D, and 5

edges, (A,B), (A,C), (A,D), (B,C), (B,D)

Voting and followings on social media applications are examples of real-

world that can be described by directed graphs.

1.2 Degree of a Vertex

The degree of a vertex i, denoted as $$k_{i}$$, is defined as the number
of edges that are adjacent to this vertex i.

The definition of the degree of a node in a directed graph is slightly more

nuanced. The in-degree of a vertex i, denoted as $$k^{in}_{i}$$, is
defined as the number of edges directed towards this vertex i. The out-
degree of a vertex i, denoted as $$k^{out}_{i}$$, is defined as the
number of edges directed away from this vertex i. The degree of vertex i in
a directed graph is therefore defined as the sum of the in-degree of this
vertex i and its out-degree. This is represented as
$$k_{i} = k^{in}_{i} + k^{out}_{i}$$.

Tables 1.1 and 1.2 tabulate the degrees of all the vertices in Figs. 1.1 and
1.2 respectively.
Table 1.1

Table shows the vertices of the graph in Fig. 1.1 and their corresponding
degrees

Vertex Degree

A 3

B 3

C 2

D 2

Total 10

Table 1.2
Table shows the vertices of the graph in Fig. 1.2 and their corresponding in-
degrees, out-degrees and degrees

Vertex In-degree Out-degree Degree

A 0 3 3

B 1 2 3

C 2 0 2

D 2 0 2

Total 5 5 10

A vertex with zero in-degree is called a source vertex , a vertex with zero
out-degree is called a sink vertex , and a vertex with in-degree and out-
degree both equal to zero is called an isolated vertex .

1.3 Degree Distribution

The degree distribution of a graph G(V, E), denoted by P(k), is defined as
the probability that a random chosen vertex has degree k. If $$|V|_{k}$$
denotes the number of vertices with degree k,
$$\begin{aligned} P(k) = \frac{|V|_{k}}{|V|} \end{aligned}$$
(1.1)
The degree distribution is plotted either as a histogram of k vs P(k)
(Fig. 1.3) or as a scree plot of k vs $$|V|_{k}$$ (Fig. 1.4).
 ../images/462433_1_En_1_Chapter/462433_1_En_1_Fig3_HTML.
gif
Fig. 1.3

Histogram of k versus P(k)

../images/462433_1_En_1_Chapter/462433_1_En_1_Fig4_HTML.
gif
Fig. 1.4

Scree plot of k versus $$|V|_{k}$$

1.4 Average Degree of a Graph

The average degree of a graph G(V, E), denoted by $$\overline{k}$$, is
defined as the average of the degrees of all the vertices in G. More
formally, the average degree is given by Eq. 1.2.
$$\begin{aligned} \overline{k} = \frac{1}{|V|}\sum \limits _{i=1}^{|V|}
k_{i} \end{aligned}$$
(1.2)
The average degree of a graph satisfies the properties given in Eqs. 1.3 and
1.4.
$$\begin{aligned} \overline{k} = \frac{2|E|}{|V|} \end{aligned}$$
(1.3)
$$\begin{aligned} \overline{k^{in}} = \overline{k^{out}}
\end{aligned}$$
(1.4)
The average degree of the graph in Fig. 1.1 as well as the graph in Fig. 1.2
is $$\frac{10}{4} = 2.5$$. Since there are 4 vertices and 5 edges in both
of these graphs, Eq. 1.3 is satisfied. The average in-degree of the graph in
Fig. 1.2 is $$\frac{5}{4} = 1.25$$, and its average out-degree is
$$\frac{5}{4} = 1.25$$. This satisfies Eq. 1.4.

1.5 Complete Graph

The maximum number of edges that a graph with |V| number of vertices, as
denoted by $$E_{max}$$, is given by Eq. 1.5.
$$\begin{aligned} E_{max} = {\left\{ \begin{array}{ll} {|V|
\atopwithdelims ()2} = \frac{|V|(|V|-1)}{2} \text { for undirected graphs} \\
2{|V| \atopwithdelims ()2} = |V|(|V|-1) \text { for directed graphs} \\
\end{array}\right. } \end{aligned}$$
(1.5)
A graph with $$|E| = E_{max}$$ number of edges is called a complete
graph. The average degree of a complete graph is $$|V|-1$$.
Figures 1.5 and 1.6 illustrate complete undirected and directed graphs each
having 20 vertices and therefore 190 and 380 edges respectively.

../images/462433_1_En_1_Chapter/462433_1_En_1_Fig5_HTML.
gif
Fig. 1.5

A complete undirected graph having 20 vertices and 190 edges

../images/462433_1_En_1_Chapter/462433_1_En_1_Fig6_HTML.
gif
Fig. 1.6

A complete directed graph having 20 vertices and 380 edges

1.6 Regular Graph

A regular graph is defined as a graph where each vertex has the same
degree, i.e, $$k_{1} = k_{2} = \cdots = k_{|V|}$$. A regular directed
graph must also satisfy the stronger condition that the in-degree and out-
degree of each vertex be equal to each other, i.e,
$$k_{1}^{in} = k_{1}^{out}$$, $$k_{2}^{in} = k_{2}^{out}$$,
$$\ldots $$, $$k_{|V|}^{in} = k_{|V|}^{out}$$. A regular graph with
vertices of degree k is called a k-regular graph or regular graph of degree k.
Figure 1.7 shows a 5-regular graph having 10 vertices.

../images/462433_1_En_1_Chapter/462433_1_En_1_Fig7_HTML.
gif
 Fig. 1.7

A 5-regular random graph on 10 vertices

1.7 Bipartite Graph

A bipartite graph is a graph whose vertices can be divided into two
independent sets L and R such that an edge connects a vertex in L to one in
R. The corresponding graph that does not have these independent set
partitions is called a folded graph .

Figure 1.8 depicts the undirected bipartite graph with its corresponding
folded graph and Fig. 1.9 illustrates the directed bipartite graph and its
corresponding folded graph.

../images/462433_1_En_1_Chapter/462433_1_En_1_Fig8_HTML.
gif
Fig. 1.8

A folded undirected graph with its corresponding bipartite

undirected graph

../images/462433_1_En_1_Chapter/462433_1_En_1_Fig9_HTML.
gif
Fig. 1.9

A folded directed graph with its corresponding bipartite directed

graph

1.8 Graph Representation

So far, we have only looked at the visualisation of a graph which is very
tedious to work with in the case of graph algorithms. Instead, we look at
several other representations of graphs.

1.8.1 Adjacency Matrix

The adjacency matrix of a graph, denoted by A, is defined as a matrix
where 1 indicates the presence of an edge and 0 indicates the absence of
one. More formally, an adjacency matrix is defined as in Eq. 1.6.
$$\begin{aligned} A_{ij} = {\left\{ \begin{array}{ll} 1 \text { is an edge
exists between the vertex } i \text { and the vertex } j\\ 0 \text { otherwise}
\end{array}\right. } \end{aligned}$$
(1.6)
The adjacency matrix for the graph in Fig. 1.1 is as shown in the matrix
below.
$$ \begin{bmatrix} 0&1&1&1 \\
1&0&1&1 \\ 1&1&0&0 \\
1&1&0&0 \\ \end{bmatrix} $$
Similarly, the adjacency matrix for the graph in Fig. 1.2 is described in the
following matrix.
$$ \begin{bmatrix} 0&1&1&1 \\
0&0&1&1 \\ 0&0&0&0 \\
0&0&0&0 \\ \end{bmatrix} $$
We can summarize the following properties from adjacency matrices.
$$\begin{aligned} A_{ii} = 0 \end{aligned}$$
(1.7)
$$\begin{aligned} A_{ii} \ne 0 \end{aligned}$$
(1.8)
$$\begin{aligned} A_{ij} = A_{ji} \end{aligned}$$
(1.9)
$$\begin{aligned} A_{ij} \ne A_{ji} \end{aligned}$$
(1.10)
$$\begin{aligned} |E| = \frac{1}{2}\sum \limits _{i,j=1}^{|V|}A_{ij}
\end{aligned}$$
(1.11)
$$\begin{aligned} |E| = \sum \limits _{i,j=1}^{|V|}A_{ij}
\end{aligned}$$
(1.12)
Undirected graphs satisfy Eqs. 1.7, 1.9 and 1.11 while directed graphs
satisfy Eqs. 1.7, 1.10 and 1.12.

1.8.2 Edge List

The edge list of a graph G(V, E) is its representation as a list of edges
where each edge $$e\in E$$ is represented as a tuple $$e = (u,v)$$
where u denotes the source vertex and v denotes the destination vertex of e.

The edge list for both the graph in Fig. 1.1 and for the graph in Fig. 1.2 is
given by {(A,B), (B,C), (B,D), (A,C), (A,D)}.

1.8.3 Adjacency List

The adjacency list of a graph G(V, E) is defined as {u: [

$$v_{1},v_{2},\ldots $$],
$$\exists \ e_{1} = (u,v_{1})\in E, e_{2} = (u,v_{2})\in E, \ldots ;\ \forall
u, v_{1}, v_{2}, \ldots \in V$$
}
Table 1.3

Adjacency list for the graph in Fig. 1.1

A : [B, C, D]

B : [A, C, D]

C: [A, B]

D: [A, B]

Table 1.4

Adjacency list for the graph in Fig. 1.2

A: [ $$\phi $$]
A: [ $$\phi $$]

B: [A]

C : [A, B]

D : [A, B]

The adjacency list for the graph in Fig. 1.1 and that for the graph in Fig. 1.2
is as shown in Tables 1.3 and 1.4 respectively.

When the graphs are small, there is not a notable difference between any of
these representations. However, when the graph is large and sparse (as in
the case of most real world networks), the adjacency matrix will be a large
matrix filled mostly with zeros. This accounts for a lot of unnecessary
space and account for a lot of time that could have been avoided during
computations. Although edge lists are concise, they are not the best data
structure for most graph algorithms. When dealing with such graphs,
adjacency lists are comparatively more effective. Adjacency lists can be
easily implemented in most programming languages as a hash table with
keys for the source vertices and a vector of destination vertices as values.
Working with this implementation can save a lot of computation time.
SNAP uses this hash table and vector representation for storing graphs [1].

1.9 Edge Attributes

Some networks may sometimes have to store information on the edges to
properly represent the corresponding complex system. This information
could be any of the following:

Weight: The frequency of communication between the connected

vertices, the strength of this connection, etc.
 Type: The type of the relationship between the connected vertices. Eg:
Family, friends, colleagues.

Ranking: Best friend, second best friend, third best friend, so on.

Sign: Friend vs foe, trust vs distrust, etc.

Properties dependent on the structure of the rest of the graph. Such as

the number of common neighbours, centrality measure, etc.

Based on edge attributes, the number of edges between vertices and the
source and destination of an edge, graphs can be further classified.

1.9.1 Unweighted Graph

Unweighted graphs are graphs where the edges do not have any associated
weights. Figures 1.1 and 1.2 are instances of an undirected unweighted
graph and a directed unweighted graph respectively.

Friendships and hyperlinks are real-world instances of unweighted graphs.

1.9.2 Weighted Graph

Weighted graphs are graphs where the edges are associated with a certain
weight. Figures 1.10 and 1.11 depict an undirected weighted graph and a
directed weighted graph respectively.

../images/462433_1_En_1_Chapter/462433_1_En_1_Fig10_HTML.
gif
Fig. 1.10

An undirected weighted graph with 4 vertices and 5 weighted

edges

../images/462433_1_En_1_Chapter/462433_1_En_1_Fig11_HTML.
gif
Fig. 1.11
 A directed weighted graph with 4 vertices and 5 weighted edges

The adjacency matrix for the graph in Fig. 1.10 is given below
$$ \begin{bmatrix} 0&1&2.5&13.75 \\
1&0&0.3&100 \\ 2.5&0.3&0&0 \\
13.75&100&0&0 \\ \end{bmatrix} $$
The adjacency matrix for the graph in Fig. 1.11 is as depicted below
$$ \begin{bmatrix} 0&1&2.5&13.75 \\
0&0&0.3&100 \\ 0&0&0&0 \\
0&0&0&0 \\ \end{bmatrix} $$
Undirected weighted graphs satisfy properties in Eqs. 1.7, 1.9 and 1.13.
$$\begin{aligned} |E| = \frac{1}{2}\sum \limits
_{i,j=1}^{|V|}nonzero(A_{ij}) \end{aligned}$$
(1.13)
Directed weighted graphs on the other hand satisfy properties in Eqs. 1.7,
1.10 and 1.14.
$$\begin{aligned} |E| = \sum \limits _{i,j=1}^{|V|}nonzero(A_{ij})
\end{aligned}$$
(1.14)
Collaborations and transportation networks are some examples of weighted
graphs.

1.9.3 Self-looped Graph

Self-loops are defined as edges whose source and destination vertices are
the same. More formally, an edge $$e\in E$$ is called a self-looped edge
if $$e = (u,u)$$ where $$u\in V$$. A graph that contains one or more
self-loops is called a self-looped graph. Figures 1.12 and 1.13 illustrate an
undirected self-looped graph and a directed self-looped graph respectively.

../images/462433_1_En_1_Chapter/462433_1_En_1_Fig12_HTML.
gif
Fig. 1.12

An undirected self-looped graph with 4 vertices and 9 edges

 ../images/462433_1_En_1_Chapter/462433_1_En_1_Fig13_HTML.
gif
Fig. 1.13

A directed self-looped graph with 4 vertices and 9 edges

The adjacency matrix for the graph in Fig. 1.12 is as shown below
$$ \begin{bmatrix} 1&1&1&1 \\
1&1&1&1 \\ 1&1&1&0 \\
1&1&0&1 \\ \end{bmatrix} $$
The adjacency matrix for the graph in Fig. 1.13 is illustrated as follows
$$ \begin{bmatrix} 1&1&1&1 \\
0&1&1&1 \\ 0&0&1&0 \\
0&0&0&1 \\ \end{bmatrix} $$
Undirected self-looped graphs satisfy properties in Eqs. 1.8, 1.9 and 1.15.
$$\begin{aligned} |E| = \frac{1}{2}\sum \limits _{i,j=1;i\ne
j}^{|V|}A_{ij} + \sum \limits _{i=1}^{|V|}A_{ii} \end{aligned}$$
(1.15)
Directed weighted graphs on the other hand satisfy properties in Eqs. 1.8,
1.10 and 1.16.
$$\begin{aligned} |E| = \sum \limits _{i,j=1;i\ne j}^{|V|}A_{ij} + \sum
\limits _{i=1}^{|V|}A_{ii} \end{aligned}$$
(1.16)
Proteins and hyperlinks are some commonly encountered examples of self-
looped graphs.

1.9.4 Multigraphs

A multigraph is a graph where multiple edges may share the same source
and destination vertices. Figures 1.14 and 1.15 are instances of undirected
and directed multigraphs respectively.

../images/462433_1_En_1_Chapter/462433_1_En_1_Fig14_HTML.
gif
Fig. 1.14

An undirected multigraph with 4 vertices and 9 edges

 ../images/462433_1_En_1_Chapter/462433_1_En_1_Fig15_HTML.
gif
Fig. 1.15

A directed multigraph with 4 vertices and 9 edges

The adjacency matrix for the graph in Fig. 1.14 is as shown below
$$ \begin{bmatrix} 0&1&2&1 \\
1&0&1&3 \\ 2&1&0&3 \\
1&3&3&0 \\ \end{bmatrix} $$
The adjacency matrix for the graph in Fig. 1.15 is illustrated as follows
$$ \begin{bmatrix} 0&1&2&1 \\
0&0&1&2 \\ 0&0&0&1 \\
0&1&2&0 \\ \end{bmatrix} $$
Undirected multigraphs satisfy properties in Eqs. 1.7, 1.9 and 1.13.
Directed multigraphs on the other hand satisfy properties in Eqs. 1.7, 1.10
and 1.14.

Communication and collaboration networks are some common instances of

multigraphs.

1.10 Path
A path from a vertex u to a vertex v is defined either as a sequence of
vertices in which each vertex is linked to the next, {u, $$u_{1}$$,
$$u_{2}$$, $$\ldots $$, $$u_{k}$$,v} or as a sequence of edges {(u,
$$u_{1}$$), ( $$u_{1}$$, $$u_{2}$$), $$\ldots $$, ( $$u_{k}$$
,v)}. A path can pass through the same edge multiple times. A path that
does not contain any repetition in either the edges or the nodes is called a
simple path . Following a sequence of such edges gives us a walk through
the graph from a vertex u to a vertex v. A path from u to v does not
necessarily imply a path from v to u.

The path {A,B,C} is a simple path in both Figs. 1.1 and 1.2. {A,B,C,B,D} is
a path in Fig. 1.1 while there are no non-simple paths in Fig. 1.2.
1.11 Cycle
A cycle is defined as a path with atleast three edges, in which the first and
the last vertices are the same, but otherwise all other vertices are distinct.
The path {A,B,C,A} and {A,B,D,A} are cycles in Fig. 1.1.

Cycles exist in graph sometimes by design. The reason behind this is

redundancy. If any edge were to fail there would still exist a path between
any pair of vertices.

1.12 Path Length

The length of a path is the number of edges in the sequence that comprises
this path. The length of the path {A,B,C} in both Figs. 1.1 and 1.2 is 2
because it contains the edges (A,B) and (B,C).

1.13 Distance
The distance between a pair of vertices u and v is defined as the number of
edges along the shortest path connecting u and v. If two nodes are not
connected, the distance is usually defined as infinity. Distance is symmetric
in undirected graphs and asymmetric in directed graphs.

The distance matrix, h of a graph is the matrix in which each element

$$h_{ij}$$ denotes the distance from vertex i to vertex j. More formally,
distance matrix is defined as given in Eq. 1.17.
$$\begin{aligned} h_{ij} = {\left\{ \begin{array}{ll} \text {the number
of edges from vertex } i \text { to vertex } j \text { if a path exists from } i
\text { to } j \\ \infty \text { otherwise } \\ \end{array}\right. }
\end{aligned}$$
(1.17)
The distance matrix for the undirected graph in Fig. 1.1 is
$$ \begin{bmatrix} 0&1&1&1 \\
1&0&1&1 \\ 1&1&0&2 \\
1&1&2&0 \\ \end{bmatrix} $$
The distance matrix for the directed graph in Fig. 1.2 is
$$ \begin{bmatrix} 0&1&1&1 \\
\infty&0&1&1 \\ \infty&\infty&0&\infty \\
\infty&\infty&\infty&0 \\ \end{bmatrix} $$

1.14 Average Path Length

The average path length of a graph, denoted as $$\overline{h}$$ is the
average of the distances between all pairs of vertices in the graph.
Formally, the average path length is given by
$$\begin{aligned} \overline{h} = \frac{1}{E_{max}}\sum \limits
_{i,j}h_{ij} \end{aligned}$$
(1.18)
All infinite distances are disregarded in the computation of the average path
length.

1.15 Diameter
The diameter of a graph is the maximum of the distances between all pairs
of vertices in this graph. While computing the diameter of a graph, all
infinite distances are disregarded.

The diameter of Figs. 1.1 and 1.2 is 2 and 1 respectively.

1.16 Connectedness of Graphs

A graph is said to be connected if for every pair of vertices, there exists a
path between them. A subgraph which is connected is called a connected
component or simply a component . A disconnected graph is a graph which
breaks apart naturally into a set of components which are connected when
considered in isolation without overlap between these components.

When dealing with directed graphs, the definition of connectedness is two-

fold. A strongly connected directed graph is one where there is a path
between every pair of vertices of this graph. While, a weakly connected
directed graph is considered connected if and only if the graph is
considered undirected.

Figure 1.1 is a connected undirected graph because there is a path between

all of the vertices. Figure 1.16 is an instance of a disconnected undirected
graph because D is an isolated vertex and hence there are no paths
connecting D to the rest of the vertices.

Figure 1.2 is a weakly connected directed graph because the following

paths do not exist in the directed graph: A to itself, B to A, B to itself, C to
all other vertices including itself, D to itself and the rest of the vertices.
But, there is a path between all pairs of vertices when Fig. 1.2 is considered
undirected. Figure 1.17 is a strongly connected directed graph where each
vertex in this directed graph has a path to all of the other vertices including
itself.

../images/462433_1_En_1_Chapter/462433_1_En_1_Fig16_HTML.
gif
Fig. 1.16

A disconnected undirected graph with 4 vertices, A, B, C and D,

and 2 edges, (A,B), (B,C) leaving D as an isolated vertex

../images/462433_1_En_1_Chapter/462433_1_En_1_Fig17_HTML.
gif
Fig. 1.17

A strongly connected directed graph with 4 vertices, A, B, C and

D, and 5 edges, (A,B), (B,C), (C,A), (C,D) and (D,B)

Giant Component

The largest component of a graph is called its giant component . It is a

unique, distinguishable component containing a significant fraction of all
the vertices and dwarfs all the other components. A,B,C is the giant
component in Fig. 1.16.

Bridge Edge
A bridge edge is an edge whose removal disconnects the graph.Every edge
in Fig. 1.17 is a bridge edge. For Fig. 1.1, the combination of edges (A,B),
(A,C), (A,D); or (A,C), (B,C); or (A,D), (B,D) are bridge edges.

Articulation Vertex

An articulation vertex is defined as a vertex which when deleted renders

the graph a disconnected one. Every vertex in Fig. 1.17 as well as in
Fig. 1.1 is an articulation vertex.

In and Out of a Vertex

For a graph G(V, E), we define the In and Out of a vertex $$v\in V$$ as
given in Eqs. 1.19 and 1.20.
$$\begin{aligned} In(v) = \{ w\in V |\ there\ exists\ a\ path\ from\ w\ to\ v
\} \end{aligned}$$
(1.19)
$$\begin{aligned} Out(v) = \{ w\in V |\ there\ exists\ a\ path\ from\ v\ to\
w \} \end{aligned}$$
(1.20)
In other words if Eq. 1.21 is satisfied by a directed graph, then this graph is
said to be a strongly connected directed graph. This means that a weakly
connected directed graph must satisfy Eq. 1.22.
$$\begin{aligned} In(v) = Out(v)\ \forall \ v\in V \end{aligned}$$
(1.21)
$$\begin{aligned} In(v) \ne Out(v)\ \forall \ v\in V \end{aligned}$$
(1.22)
Tables 1.5, 1.6, 1.7 and 1.8 tabulate the In and Out for all the vertices in
each of these graphs. From these tables, we observe that Fig. 1.17 is
strongly connected and Fig. 1.2 is weakly connected because they satisfy
Eqs. 1.21 and 1.22 respectively.
Table 1.5

In and Out for all the vertices in Fig. 1.1

$$v\in V$$ In(v) Out(v)

 $$v\in V$$ In(v) Out(v)

A A,B,C,D A,B,C,D

B A,B,C,D A,B,C,D

C A,B,C,D A,B,C,D

D A,B,C,D A,B,C,D

Table 1.6

In and Out for all the vertices in Fig. 1.2

$$v\in V$$ In(v) Out(v)

A $$\phi $$ B,C,D

B A C,D

C A,B $$\phi $$

D A,B $$\phi $$

Table 1.7

In and Out for all the vertices in Fig. 1.16

 $$v\in V$$ In(v) Out(v)

A A,B,C A,B,C

B A,B,C A,B,C

C A,B,C A,B,C

D $$\phi $$ $$\phi $$

Table 1.8

In and Out for all the vertices in Fig. 1.17

$$v\in V$$ In(v) Out(v)

A A,B,C,D A,B,C,D

B A,B,C,D A,B,C,D

C A,B,C,D A,B,C,D

D A,B,C,D A,B,C,D

Directed Acyclic Graph

A directed acyclic graph (DAG) is a directed graph that does not have any
cycles. Figure 1.2 is an instance of a DAG.

Strongly Connected Component

A strongly connected component (SCC) is a set of vertices S such that it

satisfies the following conditions:

Every pair of vertices in S has a path to one another.

There is no larger set containing S that satisfies this property.

Figure 1.18 is a weakly connected directed graph having the SCCs, E,

A,B,C and D.

../images/462433_1_En_1_Chapter/462433_1_En_1_Fig18_HTML.
gif
Fig. 1.18

A weakly connected directed graph G with 5 vertices, A, B, C, D

and E, with 6 edges, (A,B), (B,C), (B,D), (C,A), (E,A) and (E,C).
This graph has the SCCs, E, A,B,C and D

The SCC containing a vertex $$v\in V$$ can be computed using

Eq. 1.23.
$$\begin{aligned} In(V) \cap Out(v) \end{aligned}$$
(1.23)
These definitions of a DAG and SCC gives us Theorem 1.

Theorem 1

Every directed graph is a DAG on its SCC.

1. 1.

SCCs partition vertices of a graph, i.e, each node is in exactly one

SCC.
 2. 2.

If we build a graph $$G'$$ whose vertices are SCCs of G and an

edge between vertices of $$G'$$ exists if there is an edge between
corresponding SCCs of G, then $$G'$$ is a DAG.

For the proof of this theorem, we will use the graphs G in Fig. 1.18 and
$$G'$$ in Fig. 1.19.

../images/462433_1_En_1_Chapter/462433_1_En_1_Fig19_HTML.
gif
Fig. 1.19

A weakly connected graph whose vertices are the SCCs of G and

whose edges exist in $$G'$$ because there is an edge between
the corresponding SCCs in G

Proof

1. 1.

Let us assume there exists a vertex v which is a member of two SCCs

S = A,v,B and $$S'$$ = C,v,D as shown in Fig. 1.20. By the
definition of a SCC, $$S \cup S'$$ becomes one large SCC.
Therefore, SCCs partition vertices of a graph.

2. 2.
 Assume that $$G'$$ is not a DAG, i.e, there exists a directed cycle

in (as depicted in Fig. 1.21). However, by the definitions of

a SCC and a DAG this makes {A,B,C,D,E} one large SCC, rendering
$$G'$$ no longer a graph of edges between SCCs. Therefore by
contradiction, $$G'$$ is a DAG on the SCCs of G.

../images/462433_1_En_1_Chapter/462433_1_En_1_Fig20_HTML.
gif
Fig. 1.20

A strongly connected directed graph where vertex v belongs to

two SCCs A,v,B and C,v,D

../images/462433_1_En_1_Chapter/462433_1_En_1_Fig21_HTML.
gif
Fig. 1.21

A graph with the same vertices and edges as shown in Fig. 1.19
with the exception that there exists an edge between D and E to
make the graph a strongly connected one

1.17 Clustering Coefficient

The clustering coefficient of a vertex i in a graph G(V, E), denoted by
$$C_{i}$$, gives what portion of i’s neighbours are connected. Formally,
the clustering coefficient is as given in Eq. 1.24
$$\begin{aligned} C_{i} = \frac{2e_{i}}{k_{i}(k_{i}-1)} \epsilon [0,1]
\end{aligned}$$
(1.24)
where $$e_{i}$$ denotes the number of edges between the neighbours of
vertex i.
The clustering coefficients of the vertices for the graphs in Figs. 1.1 and 1.2
are as tabulated in Table 1.9.
Table 1.9

Clustering coefficient of vertices of Figs. 1.1 and 1.2

Vertex Clustering coefficient

A $$\frac{2}{3}$$

B $$\frac{2}{3}$$

C 3

D 3

1.18 Average Clustering Coefficient

The average clustering coefficient of a graph G(V, E), denoted by C, is
defined as the average of the clustering coefficients of all the vertices
$$v\ \in V$$. Formally, the average clustering coefficient is given by
$$\begin{aligned} C = \frac{1}{|V|}\sum \limits _{i}{|V|}C_{i}
\end{aligned}$$
(1.25)
The average clustering coefficients of the graphs in Figs. 1.1 and 1.2 are
both equal to $$1.\overline{6}$$.

Problems
Download the email-Eu-core directed network from the SNAP dataset
repository available at http://snap.stanford.edu/data/email-Eu-core.html.

For this dataset compute the following network parameters:

Number of nodes

Number of edges

In-degree, out-degree and degree of the first five nodes

Number of source nodes

Number of sink nodes

Number of isolated nodes

In-degree distribution

Out-degree distribution
9

Average degree, average in-degree and average out-degree

10

Distance between five pairs of random nodes

11

Shortest path length distribution

12

Diameter

13

Is the graph strongly connected? If so, compute the strongly connected

component size distribution

14

Is the graph weakly connected? If so, compute the weakly connected

component size distribution

15

Number of bridge edges

16

Number of articulation nodes

17
Number of nodes in In(v) for five random nodes

18

Number of nodes in Out(v) for five random nodes

19

Clustering coefficient for five random nodes

20

Clustering coefficient distribution

21

Average clustering coefficient

References

1. 1.
Leskovec, Jure, and Rok Sosič. 2016. Snap: A general-purpose
network analysis and graph-mining library. ACM Transactions on
Intelligent Systems and Technology (TIST) 8 (1): 1.
© Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2018
Krishna Raj P.M., Ankith Mohan and K.G. Srinivasa, Practical Social Network Analysis with Python,
Computer Communications and Networks
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-96746-2_2

2. Graph Structure of the Web

Krishna Raj P. M.1 , Ankith Mohan1 and K. G. Srinivasa2

(1) Department of ISE, Ramaiah Institute of Technology, Bangalore,

Karnataka, India
(2) Department of Information Technology, C.B.P. Government
Engineering College, Jaffarpur, Delhi, India

Krishna Raj P. M.
Email: krishnarajpm@gmail.com

In this chapter, we will take a close look at the Web when it is represented
in the form of a graph and attempt to understand its structure. We will begin
by looking at the reasons behind why we must be interested with this
problem concerning the Web’s structure. There are numerous reasons as to
why the structure of the Web is worth studying, but the most prominent
ones are as follows: the Web is a large system that evolved naturally over
time, understanding such a system’s organization and properties could help
better comprehend several other real-world systems; the study could yield
valuable insight into Web algorithms for crawling, searching and
community discovery, which could in turn help improve strategies to
accomplish these tasks; we could gain an understanding into the
sociological phenomena characterising content creation in its evolution; the
study could help predict the evolution of known or new web structures and
lead to the development of better algorithms for discovering and organizing
them; and we could predict the emergence of new phenomena in the Web.
Bowtie Structure of the Web
 Reference [1] represented the Web as a directed graph where the
webpages are treated as vertices and hyperlinks are the edges and studied
the following properties in this graph: diameter, degree distribution,
connected components and macroscopic structure. However, the dark-web
(part of the Web that is composed of webpages that are not directly
accessible (even by Web browsers)) were disregarded. This study consisted
of performing web crawls on a snapshot of the graph consisting of 203
million URLs connected by 1.5 billion hyperlinks. The web crawl is based
on a large set of starting points accumulated over time from various
sources, including voluntary submissions. A 465 MHz server with 12 GB of
memory was dedicated for this purpose.
Reference [1] took a large snapshot of the Web and using Theorem 1,
attempted to understand how its SCCs fitted together as a DAG.
Power Law
The power law is a functional relationship between two quantities
where a relative change in one quantity results in a proportional relative
change in the other quantity, independent of the initial size of those
quantities, i.e, one quantity varies as the power of the other. Hence the name
power law [3]. Power law distributions as defined on positive integers is the
probability of the value i being proportional to $$\frac{1}{i^k}$$ for
a small positive integer k.

2.1 Algorithms
In this section we will look at several algorithms used by [1] in their
experiments.

2.1.1 Breadth First Search (BFS) Algorithm

The BFS algorithm (Algorithm 1) takes as input a graph G(V, E) and a
source vertex s. The algorithm returns the set of vertices that the source
vertex has a path to.

../images/462433_1_En_2_Chapter/462433_1_En_2_Figa_HTML.gif

The Web crawl proceeds in roughly a BFS manner, subject to various rules
designed to avoid overloading, infinite paths, spam, time-outs, etc. Each
build is based on crawl data after further filtering and processing. Due to
multiple starting points, it is possible for the resulting graph to have several
connected components.

2.1.2 Strongly Connected Components (SCC) Algorithm

The SCC algorithm (Algorithm 4) takes a graph G(V, E) as input and
returns a list of all the SCCs in this graph as output. The SCC of G is
computed using Eq. 1.21. The function unique returns a list of all the
distinct elements in the input list. For instance, unique([1,2,1,3,2,2]) will
return [1,2,3].

../images/462433_1_En_2_Chapter/462433_1_En_2_Figb_HTML.gif

../images/462433_1_En_2_Chapter/462433_1_En_2_Figc_HTML.gif

../images/462433_1_En_2_Chapter/462433_1_En_2_Figd_HTML.gif

2.1.3 Weakly Connected Components (WCC) Algorithm

The WCC algorithm (Algorithm 5) computes the list of all WCCs given a
graph G(V, E) as input.

../images/462433_1_En_2_Chapter/462433_1_En_2_Fige_HTML.gif

Three sets of experiments on these web crawls were performed from May
1999 to October 1999.

2.2 First Set of Experiments—Degree

Distributions
The first set of experiments involved generating in-degree and out-degree
distributions on the graph of the Web crawl. The in-degree distribution is
observed to follow a power law with exponent of 2.1 as seen in Figs. 2.1
and 2.2. The out-degree distribution is found to also follow a power law
with exponent of 2.72 as shown in Figs. 2.3 and 2.4.
 ../images/462433_1_En_2_Chapter/462433_1_En_2_Fig1_HTML.gif
Fig. 2.1 In-degree distribution when only off-site edges are considered

../images/462433_1_En_2_Chapter/462433_1_En_2_Fig2_HTML.gif
Fig. 2.2 In-degree distribution over May and October 1999 crawls

../images/462433_1_En_2_Chapter/462433_1_En_2_Fig3_HTML.gif
Fig. 2.3 Out-degree distribution when only off-site edges are considered

../images/462433_1_En_2_Chapter/462433_1_En_2_Fig4_HTML.gif
Fig. 2.4 Out-degree distribution over May and October 1999 crawls

2.3 Second Set of Experiments—Connected

Components
The second set of experiments were concerned with the study of the
directed and undirected connected components of the Web. The Web was
considered as an undirected graph and the sizes of the undirected
component was computed. By running the WCC algorithm on the Web, a
giant component comprising of 186 million nodes in which fully 91% of
these nodes have a path to one another by following either the forward or
the backward edges was identified. The remaining 17 million nodes formed
the $$DISCONNECTED\ COMPONENTS$$ . Even the distribution of
the sizes of the WCCs exhibits a power law with exponent 2.5 as illustrated
in Fig. 2.5.

../images/462433_1_En_2_Chapter/462433_1_En_2_Fig5_HTML.gif
Fig. 2.5 Distribution of WCCs on the Web
 However, there still exists the question as to whether this widespread
connectivity results from a few vertices of large in-degree. The answer is as
tabulated in Table 2.1. Table shows the size of the largest surviving weak
components when edges to pages with in-degree atleast k are removed from
the graph.
Table 2.1 Size of the largest surviving weak component when links to pages with in-degree at least k
are removed from the graph

k 1000 100 10 5 4 3
Size (millions) 177 167 105 59 41 15

Table 2.1 gives us the following insights: Connectivity of the Web graph
is extremely resilient and does not depend on the existence of vertices of
high degree, vertices which are useful tend to include those vertices that
have a high PageRank or those which are considered as good hubs or
authorities are embedded in a graph that is well connected without them.
To understand what the giant component is composed of, it was
subjected to the SCC algorithm. The algorithm returned a single large SCC
consisting of 56 million vertices which barely amounts to 28% of all the
vertices in the crawl. This corresponds to all of the vertices that can reach
one another along the directed edges situated at the heart of the Web graph.
Diameter of this component is atleast 28. The distribution of sizes of the
SCCs also obeys power law with exponent of 2.5 as observed in Fig. 2.6.

../images/462433_1_En_2_Chapter/462433_1_En_2_Fig6_HTML.gif
Fig. 2.6 Distribution of SCCs on the Web

2.4 Third Set of Experiments—Number of

Breadth First Searches
The third set of experiments were related to computing the number of
breadth first searches from randomly chosen start vertices in the web crawl
to understand what apart from the SCC constitutes the giant component.
570 vertices were randomly chosen and the BFS algorithm was run
twice from each of these selected vertices, once in the forward direction,
following the direction of the edges in the Web graph, and the other in the
backward direction, following the edges in the reverse direction.
Each of these BFS traversals exhibited a sharp bimodal behaviour: it
would either die out after reaching a small set of vertices (90% of the time
this set has fewer than 90 vertices, in extreme cases it has a few hundred
thousand), or it would explode to cover about 100 million vertices. Further,
for a fraction of the starting vertices, both the forward and the backward
BFS runs would explode, each covering about 100 million vertices (
$$\approx {50\%}$$). This behaviour can be observed in Figs. 2.7,
2.8 and 2.9. These explosive nodes are the ones which correspond to the
SCC.

../images/462433_1_En_2_Chapter/462433_1_En_2_Fig7_HTML.gif
Fig. 2.7 Cumulative distribution on the number of nodes reached when BFS is started from a
random vertex and follows in-links

../images/462433_1_En_2_Chapter/462433_1_En_2_Fig8_HTML.gif
Fig. 2.8 Cumulative distribution on the number of nodes reached when BFS is started from a
random vertex and follows out-links

../images/462433_1_En_2_Chapter/462433_1_En_2_Fig9_HTML.gif
Fig. 2.9 Cumulative distribution on the number of nodes reached when BFS is started from a
random vertex and follows both in-links and out-links

Zipf’s Law
Zipf’s law states that the frequency of occurrence of a certain value is
inversely proportional to its rank in the frequency table [3]. The in-degree
distribution shows a fit more with Zipf distribution than the power law as is
evident from Fig. 2.10.

../images/462433_1_En_2_Chapter/462433_1_En_2_Fig10_HTML.gif
Fig. 2.10 In-degree distribution plotted as power law and Zipf distribution
 From the previous set of experiments, we got the giant undirected
component, the $$DISCONNECTED\ COMPONENTS$$ and the
SCC. The 100 million vertices whose forward BFS traversals exploded
correspond to either the SCC component or a component called IN. Since,
SCC corresponds to 56 million vertices, this leaves with 44 million vertices
( $$\approx {22\%}$$) for IN. On similar lines, the 100 million
vertices whose backward BFS traversals exploded correspond to either SCC
or a component called OUT, which will have 44 million vertices (
$$\approx {22\%}$$). This leaves us with roughly 44 million vertices
( $$\approx {22\%}$$), which are not yet accounted for. These
vertices were placed in a component called TENDRILS. These components
altogether form the famous bowtie structure (Fig. 2.11) of the Web.

../images/462433_1_En_2_Chapter/462433_1_En_2_Fig11_HTML.gif
Fig. 2.11 Bowtie structure of the graph of the Web

The numbers of the vertices in each of these components given above is

a rough estimate. The actual numbers are as given in Table 2.2.
Table 2.2 Sizes of the components forming the bowtie

Region Size (number of vertices)

SCC 56,463,993
IN 43,343,168
OUT 43,166,185
TENDRILS 43,797,944
DISC. COMP. 16,777,756
Total 203,549,046

The intuition behind these components is that IN corresponds to those

webpages that can reach the SCC, but cannot be reached back from the IN
component. This possibly contains new webpages that have not yet been
discovered and linked to. The webpages that are accessible from the SCC,
but do have a link back to this component correspond to OUT. The web
sites of private corporations that contain only internal links could be the
OUT component. The pages that can neither reach the SCC, nor can it be
reached by the SCC form the TENDRILS.
 Of the 570 starting vertices, 172 correspond to the TENDRILS and the
$$DISCONNECTED\ COMPONENT$$. The BFS algorithm cannot
differentiate between these. 128 of these vertices correspond to IN, 134
correspond to OUT and the remaining 136 correspond to the SCC.
Insights Derived from This Study
The distribution of degrees and the sizes of several various components
follow a power law. Therefore, power law phenomenon must be a basic
Web property.
It was hypothesized that the Web was more likely to be a single giant
SCC. One way to look at this is as follows: Assume that the Web consisted
of two equally large SCCs. If there existed even a single link from one of
these SCCs to the other, then by the definition of a SCC, these two SCCs
would merge into one large SCC. Since the Web easily consists of a million
webpages with atleast a billion hyperlinks interconnecting these webpages,
the likelihood of a link not crossing over between the SCCs is extremely
small. Thus, the Web could plausibly be one large SCC where one could
easily go from any page to any other. However, the bowtie Web structure
gave us the real organization of the Web.
Although the bowtie structure of the Web explains its conceptual
organization, it leaves the following questions unanswered:
Why are all the pages treated equally? Shouldn’t websites of popular
search engines or social media sites given more importance than others?
Which are the most important pages? Is there a certain network property
exhibited by these pages that explain its importance?
What is the internal structure of the giant SCC? Is it a regular graph? Is
there a SCC inside this giant SCC? Is there a large central core with
several smaller components in its periphery?
How far apart are the vertices in the SCC? Do all the paths have more or
less the same distance? Does the distribution of a path follow a well
known probability distribution? If so, is it expected or surprising?
Study of Properties of Internet
Reference [2] performed a study exclusively at understanding the
power-law exhibition of certain network properties of the Internet between
November 1997 and December 1998.
The following four datasets were used:
 Int-11-97: This is the inter-domain topology of the Internet in November
of 1997 with 3015 nodes, 5156 edges, and 3.42 average outdegree.
Int-04-98: This identifies the inter-domain topology of the Internet in
April of 1998 with 3530 nodes, 6432 edges, and 3.65 average outdegree.
Int-12-98: This corresponds to the inter-domain topology of the Internet
in December of 1998 with 4389 nodes, 8256 edges, and 3.76 average
outdegree.
Rout-95: This lists the routers of the Internet in 1995 with 3888 nodes,
5012 edges, and an average outdegree of 2.57.
The first three datasets signify an evolving network while the last
dataset represents the topology of the routers of the Internet in 1995 used in
[4].
Here, the out-degree of a node v is denoted by $$d_{v}$$,
$$r_{v}$$ denotes the rank of node v (indexed in order of decreasing
out-degree), and $$f_{d}$$ denotes the frequency of out-degree d.

2.5 Rank Exponent $$\mathcal {R}$$

From the log-log plots of the out-degree $$d_{v}$$ as a function of the
rank $$r_{v}$$ in the sequence of decreasing out-degree (shown in
Figs. 2.12, 2.13, 2.14 and 2.15), the paper shows the following results:
The out-degree, $$d_{v}$$, of a node v is proportional to the rank of
this node, $$r_{v}$$, to the power of a constant, $$\mathcal {R}$$
(Eq. 2.1).
$$\begin{aligned} d_{v} \propto r_{v}^{\mathcal {R}} (2.1)
\end{aligned}$$
If the nodes of the graph are sorted in decreasing order of out-degree,
then the rank exponent, $$\mathcal {R}$$ is defined to be the slope of
the node versus the rank of the nodes in the log-log scale.
The out-degree, $$d_{v}$$, of a node v is a function of the rank of this
node, $$r_{v}$$, and the rank exponent, $$\mathcal {R}$$, as in
Eq. 2.2.
$$\begin{aligned} d_{v} = \frac{1}{N^{\mathcal (2.2)
{R}}}r_{v}^{R} \end{aligned}$$
 The number of edges, |E|, of a graph can be estimated as a function of the
number of nodes, |V|, and the rank exponent, $$\mathcal {R}$$, as in
Eq. 2.3.
$$\begin{aligned} |E| = \frac{1}{2(\mathcal {R}+1)}\left( 1- (2.3)
\frac{1}{N^{\mathcal {R}+1}}\right) ^{|V|} \end{aligned}$$

../images/462433_1_En_2_Chapter/462433_1_En_2_Fig12_HTML.gif
Fig. 2.12 Log-log plot of the out-degree $$d_{v}$$ as a function of the rank $$r_{v}$$ in
the sequence of decreasing out-degree for Int-11-97

../images/462433_1_En_2_Chapter/462433_1_En_2_Fig13_HTML.gif
Fig. 2.13 Log-log plot of the out-degree $$d_{v}$$ as a function of the rank $$r_{v}$$ in
the sequence of decreasing out-degree for Int-04-98

../images/462433_1_En_2_Chapter/462433_1_En_2_Fig14_HTML.gif
Fig. 2.14 Log-log plot of the out-degree $$d_{v}$$ as a function of the rank $$r_{v}$$ in
the sequence of decreasing out-degree for Int-12-98

../images/462433_1_En_2_Chapter/462433_1_En_2_Fig15_HTML.gif
Fig. 2.15 Log-log plot of the out-degree $$d_{v}$$ as a function of the rank $$r_{v}$$ in
the sequence of decreasing out-degree for Rout-95

2.6 Out-Degree Exponent $$\mathcal {O}$$

The log-log plots of the frequency $$f_{d}$$ as a function of the out-
degree d (illustrated in Figs. 2.16, 2.17, 2.18 and 2.19), gives the following
results:
The frequency, $$f_{d}$$, of an out-degree, d, is proportional to the
out-degree to the power of a constant, $$\mathcal {O}$$ (Eq. 2.4).
(2.4)
 $$\begin{aligned} f_{d} \propto d^{\mathcal {O}}
\end{aligned}$$
The out-degree exponent, $$\mathcal {O}$$, is defined to be the slope
of the plot of the frequency of the out-degrees versus the out-degrees in
log-log scale.

../images/462433_1_En_2_Chapter/462433_1_En_2_Fig16_HTML.gif
Fig. 2.16 Log-log plot of frequency $$f_{d}$$ versus the out-degree d for Int-11-97

../images/462433_1_En_2_Chapter/462433_1_En_2_Fig17_HTML.gif
Fig. 2.17 Log-log plot of frequency $$f_{d}$$ versus the out-degree d for Int-04-98

../images/462433_1_En_2_Chapter/462433_1_En_2_Fig18_HTML.gif
Fig. 2.18 Log-log plot of frequency $$f_{d}$$ versus the out-degree d for Int-12-98

../images/462433_1_En_2_Chapter/462433_1_En_2_Fig19_HTML.gif
Fig. 2.19 Log-log plot of frequency $$f_{d}$$ versus the out-degree d for Rout-95

2.7 Hop Plot Exponent $$\mathcal {H}$$

Here, the total number of pairs of nodes P(h) within h hops, defined as the
total number of pairs of nodes within less or equal to h hops, including self-
pairs, and counting all other pairs twice, is plotted as the function of the
number of hops h in log-log scale (depicted in Figs. 2.20, 2.21, 2.22 and
2.23). This gives the following results:

../images/462433_1_En_2_Chapter/462433_1_En_2_Fig20_HTML.gif
Fig. 2.20 Log-log plot of the number of pairs of nodes P(h) within h hops versus the number of hops
h for Int-11-97
 ../images/462433_1_En_2_Chapter/462433_1_En_2_Fig21_HTML.gif
Fig. 2.21 Log-log plot of the number of pairs of nodes P(h) within h hops versus the number of hops
h for Int-04-98

../images/462433_1_En_2_Chapter/462433_1_En_2_Fig22_HTML.gif
Fig. 2.22 Log-log plot of the number of pairs of nodes P(h) within h hops versus the number of hops
h for Int-12-98

The total number of pairs of nodes, P(h), within h hops, is proportional to

the number of hops to the power of a constant, $$\mathcal {H}$$
(Eq. 2.5)
$$\begin{aligned} P(h) \propto h^{\mathcal {H}}, h<< (2.5)
\delta \end{aligned}$$
where $$\delta $$ is the diameter of the graph.
If we plot the number of pairs of nodes, P(h), within h hops as a function
of the number of hops in log-log scale. For $$h<< \delta $$, the
slope of this plot is defined to be the hop-plot exponent
$$\mathcal {H}$$
The number of pairs within h hops is as given in Eq. 2.6.
$$\begin{aligned} P(h) = {\left\{ \begin{array}{ll} ch^{\mathcal
{H}}, h<< \delta \\ |V|^{2}, h \ge \delta \end{array}\right. } (2.6)
\end{aligned}$$
where $$c = |V| + 2|E|$$ to satisfy internal conditions.
Given a graph with |V| nodes, |E| edges and $$\mathcal {H}$$ hop-plot
exponent, the effective diameter, $$\delta _{ef}$$ is defined as in
Eq. 2.7.
$$\begin{aligned} \delta _{ef} = \left( \frac{|V|^{2}} (2.7)
{|V|+2|E|}\right) ^{1/\mathcal {H}} \end{aligned}$$
The average size of the neighbourhood, NN(h), within h hops as a
function of the hop-plot exponent, $$\mathcal {H}$$, for
$$h<< \delta $$, is as given in Eq. 2.8
 $$\begin{aligned} NN(h) = \frac{c}{|V|}h^{\mathcal {H}}-1 (2.8)
\end{aligned}$$
where $$c = |V| + 2|E|$$ to satisfy internal conditions.
The average out-degree estimate , $$NN'(h)$$, within h hops with
average out-degree $$\overline{d}$$, is as given in Eq. 2.9
$$\begin{aligned} NN'(h) = \overline{d}(\overline{d}-1)^{h-1} (2.9)
\end{aligned}$$

../images/462433_1_En_2_Chapter/462433_1_En_2_Fig23_HTML.gif
Fig. 2.23 Log-log plot of the number of pairs of nodes P(h) within h hops versus the number of hops
h for Rout-95

2.8 Eigen Exponent $$\mathcal {E}$$

The plot of the eigenvalue $$\lambda _{i}$$ as a function of i in the log-
log scale for the first 20 eigenvalues in the decreasing order (shown in
Figs. 2.24, 2.25, 2.26 and 2.27) gives the following results:
The eigenvalues, $$\lambda _{i}$$, of a graph are proportional to the
order, i, to the power of a constant, $$\mathcal {E}$$ is as given in
Eq. 2.10.
$$\begin{aligned} \lambda _{i} \propto i^{\mathcal {E}} (2.10)
\end{aligned}$$
The eigen exponent $$\mathcal {E}$$ is defined as the slope of the
plot of the sorted eigenvalues as a function of their order in the log-log
scale.

../images/462433_1_En_2_Chapter/462433_1_En_2_Fig24_HTML.gif
Fig. 2.24 Log-log plot of the eigenvalues in decreasing order for Int-11-97

../images/462433_1_En_2_Chapter/462433_1_En_2_Fig25_HTML.gif
Fig. 2.25 Log-log plot of the eigenvalues in decreasing order for Int-04-98
 ../images/462433_1_En_2_Chapter/462433_1_En_2_Fig26_HTML.gif
Fig. 2.26 Log-log plot of the eigenvalues in decreasing order for Int-12-98

../images/462433_1_En_2_Chapter/462433_1_En_2_Fig27_HTML.gif
Fig. 2.27 Log-log plot of the eigenvalues in decreasing order for Rout-95

The proofs for many of these results can be found in [2].

Problems
Download the Epinions directed network from the SNAP dataset repository
available at http://snap.stanford.edu/data/soc-Epinions1.html.
For this dataset compute the structure of this social network using the
same methods as Broder et al. employed.

22 Compute the in-degree and out-degree distributions and plot the power
law for each of these distributions.

23 Choose 100 nodes at random from the network and do one forward
and one backward BFS traversal for each node. Plot the cumulative
distributions of the nodes covered in these BFS runs as shown in Fig. 2.7.
Create one figure for the forward BFS and one for the backward BFS. How
many nodes are in the OUT and IN components? How many nodes are in
the TENDRILS component?
(Hint: The forward BFS plot gives the number of nodes in SCC
$$+$$OUT and similarly, the backward BFS plot gives the number of
nodes in SCC $$+$$IN).

24 What is the probability that a path exists between two nodes chosen
uniformly from the graph? What if the node pairs are only drawn from the
WCC of the two networks? Compute the percentage of node pairs that were
connected in each of these cases.

References
1. Broder, Andrei, Ravi Kumar, Farzin Maghoul, Prabhakar Raghavan, Sridhar Rajagopalan,
Raymie Stata, Andrew Tomkins, and Janet Wiener. 2000. Graph structure in the web. Computer
Networks 33 (1–6): 309–320.

2. Faloutsos, Michalis, Petros Faloutsos, and Christos Faloutsos. 1999. On power-law relationships
of the internet topology. In ACM SIGCOMM computer communication review, vol. 29, 251–262,
ACM.

3. Newman, Mark E.J. 2005. Power laws, pareto distributions and zipf’s law. Contemporary Physics
46 (5): 323–351.

4. Pansiot, Jean-Jacques, and Dominique Grad. 1998. On routes and multicast trees in the internet.
ACM SIGCOMM Computer Communication Review 28 (1): 41–50.
© Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2018
Krishna Raj P.M., Ankith Mohan and K.G. SrinivasaPractical Social
Network Analysis with PythonComputer Communications and
Networkshttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-96746-2_3

3. Random Graph Models

Krishna Raj P. M.1 , Ankith Mohan1 and K. G. Srinivasa2
(1)
Department of ISE, Ramaiah Institute of Technology, Bangalore,
Karnataka, India
(2)
Department of Information Technology, C.B.P. Government Engineering
College, Jaffarpur, Delhi, India

Krishna Raj P. M.
Email: krishnarajpm@gmail.com

The exercises in Chap. 1 required the computation of several network

properties. Are these computed values as expected or surprising? From
these values, it is impossible to conclude per se. Instead, we require a null
model for comparison. One such null model for the study on real-world
graphs would be random graphs. There have been numerous approaches to
generate random graphs. In this section, we will look at some of the most
prominent models used to generate random graphs that are capable of being
compared with real-world graphs.

3.1 Random Graphs

A random graph, denoted by $$G^{*}(|V|,|E|)$$, can be defined as a
collection of vertices, with edges connecting pairs of them at random. It is
assumed that the presence or absence of an edge between two vertices is
assumed to be independent of the presence or absence of any other edge, so
that each edge may be considered to be present with probability p.
3.2 Erdös–Rényi Random Graph Model
Paul Erdös and Alfréd Rényi were two prominent Hungarian
mathematicians who proposed this random graph model which has certain
properties which, with surprising accuracy match the properties of real-
world networks.

Let $$G_{|V|,|E|}$$ denote the set of all graphs having |V| vertices,
$$v_{1}, v_{2},\ldots , v_{|V|}$$ and |E| edges. These graphs must not
have self-edges or multiple edges. Thus a graph belonging to
$$G_{|V|,|E|}$$ is obtained by choosing |E| out of the possible
$${|V|\atopwithdelims ()2}$$ edges between the vertices
$$v_{1}, v_{2}, \ldots , v_{|V|}$$, and therefore the number of elements
of $$G_{|V|,|E|}$$ is equal to
$${{|V|\atopwithdelims ()2}\atopwithdelims ()|E|}$$. A random graph
$$\Gamma _{|V|,|E|}$$ can be defined as an element of
$$G_{|V|,|E|}$$ chosen as random, so that each of the elements of
$$G_{|V|,|E|}$$ have the same probability to be chosen, namely
$$\frac{1}{{{|V|\atopwithdelims ()2}\atopwithdelims ()|E|}}$$.

From a different viewpoint, the formation of a random graph may be

considered as a stochastic process defined as follows: At time $$t=1$$
we choose one out of the $${|V|\atopwithdelims ()2}$$ possible edges
connecting the vertices $$v_{1}, v_{2}, \ldots , v_{|V|}$$, each of these
edges having the same probability of being chosen, let this edge be denoted
by $$e_{1}$$. At time $$t=2$$ we choose one of the
$${|V|\atopwithdelims ()2}-1$$ edges different from $$e_{1}$$, all of
these being equiprobable. Continuing this process at time $$t=k+1$$ we
choose one of the $${|V|\atopwithdelims ()2}-k$$ possible edges
different from $$e_{1}, e_{2}, \ldots , e_{k}$$ already chosen, each of
the remaining edges being equiprobable, i.e, having probability
$$\frac{1}{{|V|\atopwithdelims ()2}-k}$$. This graph consisting of
vertices $$v_{1}, v_{2}, \ldots , v_{|V|}$$ and the edges
$$e_{1}, e_{2}, \ldots , e_{|E|}$$ is the random graph denoted by
$$\Gamma _{|V|,|E|}$$.
This second point of view gives us the evolution of
$$\Gamma _{|V|,|E|}$$ as |E| increases. This evolution shows very clear-
cut features. If |V| is a fixed large positive integer and |E| is increasing from
1 to $${|V|\atopwithdelims ()2}$$, the evolution passes through five
clearly distinguishable phases. These phases correspond to ranges of
growth of the number |E| of edges, these ranges being defined in terms of
the number |V| of vertices. These phases, with increasing p, are as follows:

1. 1.

$$p=0$$: Graph with |V| isolated vertices.

2. 2.

Phase 1, $$p=\frac{1}{|V|-1}$$: Giant component appears.

3. 3.

Phase 2, $$p=\frac{C}{|V|-1}$$: The average degree is constant but

lots of isolated vertices still exist.

4. 4.

Phase 3, $$p=\frac{log|V|}{|V|-1}$$: Fewer number of isolated

vertices exist.

5. 5.

Phase 4, $$p=\frac{2log|V|}{|V|-1}$$: The graph contains no more

isolated vertices.

6. 6.

Phase 5, $$p=1$$: A complete graph is obtained.

The proofs for each of these phases can be found in [5].

There are two variants of this graph model,

$$G_{n,p}$$ denotes a graph on n vertices where each edge (u,v)

appears independent and identically distributed with probability p.

$$G_{n,m}$$ denotes a graph on n vertices and m uniformly at

random picked edges.

n, p and m do not uniquely determine the graphs. Since the graph is the
result of a random process, we can have several different realizations for
the same values of n, p and m. Figure 3.1 gives instances of undirected
graphs generated using this model and Fig. 3.2 are examples of directed
graphs also generated using the model. Each of these graphs have
$$n = 5$$ and $$m = 5$$.

../images/462433_1_En_3_Chapter/462433_1_En_3_Fig1_HTML.
gif
Fig. 3.1

Figure shows three undirected graph variants of $$G_{5,5}$$

../images/462433_1_En_3_Chapter/462433_1_En_3_Fig2_HTML.
gif
Fig. 3.2

Figure shows three directed graph variants of $$G_{5,5}$$

If we consider a random graph $$\Gamma _{|V|,|E|}$$ having |V|

possible vertices and |E| edges, and choose uniformly at random one of the
$${{|V|\atopwithdelims ()2}\atopwithdelims ()|E|}$$ possible graphs
which can be formed from the |V| vertices $$P_{1}$$, $$P_{2}$$,
$$\ldots $$, $$P_{|V|}$$ by selecting |E| edges from the
$${|V|\atopwithdelims ()2}$$ possible edges. The effective number of
vertices of $$\Gamma _{|V|,|E|}$$ may be less than |V| since some
vertices $$P_{i}$$ may not be connected in $$\Gamma _{|V|,|E|}$$
with any other vertices. These vertices $$P_{i}$$ are the isolated
vertices. These isolated vertices are still considered as belonging to
$$\Gamma _{|V|,|E|}$$.

$$\Gamma _{|V|,|E|}$$ is called completely connected if it effectively

contains all the vertices $$P_{1}$$, $$P_{2}$$, $$\ldots $$,
$$P_{n}$$.

$$\Gamma _{|V|,|E|}$$ has the statistical properties stated in the

Theorems 2, 3, 4 and 5.

Theorem 2

If $$P_{0}(|V|,|E_{c}|)$$ denotes the probability of

$$\Gamma _{|V|,|E|}$$ being completely connected, then we get Eq. 3.1
$$\begin{aligned} \lim _{|V|\rightarrow \infty }P_{0}(|V|,|E_{c}|) = e^{-
e^{-2c}} \end{aligned}$$
(3.1)
where $$|E_{c}| = [\frac{1}{2}|V|log|V|+c|V|]$$. Here,
$$c\in \mathbb {R}$$ and [x] denotes the integral part of x.

Theorem 3

If $$P_{k}(|V|,|E_{c}|)\ (k=0,1,\ldots )$$ denotes the probability of the

giant component of $$\Gamma _{|V|,|E|}$$ consisting effectively of
$$|V|-k$$ vertices, then we get Eq. 3.2
$$\begin{aligned} \lim _{|V|\rightarrow \infty }P_{k}(|V|,|E_{c}|) =
\frac{(e^{-2c})^{k}e^{-e^{-2c}}}{k!} \end{aligned}$$
(3.2)
i.e, the number of vertices outside the giant component of
$$\Gamma _{|V|,|E|}$$ is distributed in the limit according to Poisson’s
law with mean $$e^{-2c}$$.

Theorem 4
If $$\prod _{k}(|V|,|E_{c}|)$$ denotes the probability of
$$\Gamma _{|V|,|E|}$$ consisting of exactly $$k+1$$ disjoint
components ( $$\prod _{0}(|V|,|E_{c}|) = P_{0}(|V|,|E_{c}|)$$). Then we
get Eq. 3.3
$$\begin{aligned} \lim _{|V|\rightarrow \infty }\prod _{k}(|V|,|E_{c}|) =
\frac{(e^{-2c})^{k}e^{-e^{-2c}}}{k!} \end{aligned}$$
(3.3)
i.e, the number of components of $$\Gamma _{|V|,|E|}$$ diminished by
one is the limit distributed according to Poisson’s law with mean value
$$e^{-2c}$$.

Theorem 5

If the edges of $$\Gamma _{|V|,|E|}$$ are chosen successively so that

after each step, every edge which has not yet been chosen has the same
probability to be chosen as the next, and if we continue this process until
the graph becomes completely connected, the probability that the number
of necessary steps v will be equal to a number l is given by Eq. 3.4
$$\begin{aligned} P(v_{|V|}) = \left[ \frac{1}{2}|V|log|V|] + l\right]
\sim \frac{2}{n}e^{\frac{-2l}{n}-e^{\frac{-2l}{n}}} \end{aligned}$$
(3.4)
for $$|l| = O(n)$$ where $$v_{|V|}$$ denotes the number of edges of
$$\Gamma _{|V|,|E|}$$ and we get Eq. 3.5
$$\begin{aligned} \lim _{|V|\rightarrow \infty }P\left( \frac{v_{|V|}-
\frac{1}{2}|V|log|V|}{|V|}<x\right) = e^{-e^{-2x}} \end{aligned}$$
(3.5)

The proofs for these theorems may be found in [4].

3.2.1 Properties

We will look at various graph properties of the $$G_{n,p}$$ variant of

this graph model.

3.2.1.1 Edges
Let P(|E|) denote the probability that $$G_{n,p}$$ generates a graph on
|E| edges.
$$\begin{aligned} P(|E|) = {E_{max}\atopwithdelims ()|E|}p^{|E|}(1-
p)^{E_{max}-|E|} \end{aligned}$$
(3.6)
From Eq. 3.6, we observe that P(|E|) follows a binomial distribution with
mean of $$pE_{max}$$ and variance of $$p(1-p)E_{max}$$.

3.2.1.2 Degree

Let $$X_{v}$$ be the random variable measuring the degree of vertex v.

$$\begin{aligned} X_{v} = X_{v,v_{1}} + X_{v,v_{2}} + \cdots +
X_{v,v_{|V|-1}} \end{aligned}$$
where $$X_{v,u}$$ is a {0,1}-random variable which tells us whether or
not the edge (v,u) exists. The expectation of the degree of vertex v is as
given in Eq. 3.7.
$$\begin{aligned} \mathbb {E}[X_{v}] = \sum \limits
_{u=v_{1}}^{v_{|V|-1}}\mathbb {E}[X_{v,u}] = p(|V|-1)
\end{aligned}$$
(3.7)

3.2.1.3 Degree Distribution

The degree distribution of $$G_{n,p}$$ is given in Eq. 3.8

$$\begin{aligned} P(k) = {|V|-1 \atopwithdelims ()k}p^{k}(1-p)^{|V|-1-
k} \end{aligned}$$
(3.8)
Equation 3.8 shows that the degree distribution follows a binomial
distribution with mean, $$\overline{k} = p(|V|-1)$$ and variance,
$$\sigma ^{2} = p(1-p)(|V|-1)$$.
$$\begin{aligned} \frac{\sigma }{\overline{k}} = \left[ \frac{1-p}
{p}\frac{1}{|V|-1}\right] ^{\frac{1}{2}} \rightarrow \frac{1}{|V|-1}\ as\
|V| \rightarrow \infty \end{aligned}$$
By the law of large numbers, as the network size increases, the distribution
becomes increasingly narrow, i.e, we are increasingly confident that the
degree of the vertex is in the vicinity of k.
3.2.1.4 Clustering Coefficient

The clustering coefficient of a graph is given by Sect. 3.2.1.4.

$$\begin{aligned} C_{i} = \frac{2e_{i}}{k_{i}(k_{i}-1)}
\end{aligned}$$
where $$e_{i}$$ is the number of edges between i’s neighbours.
$$\begin{aligned} e_{i} = {\left\{ \begin{array}{ll} p\frac{k_{i}
(k_{i}-1)}{2}\ if\ undirected \\ pk_{i}(k_{i}-1)\ if\ directed
\end{array}\right. } \end{aligned}$$
(3.9)
From Eq. 3.9, we get
$$\begin{aligned} C_{i} = {\left\{ \begin{array}{ll} \frac{2}{k_{i}
(k_{i}-1)}p\frac{k_{i}(k_{i}-1)}{2}\ if\ undirected \\ \frac{2}{k_{i}
(k_{i}-1)}pk_{i}(k_{i}-1)\ if\ directed \end{array}\right. } = {\left\{
\begin{array}{ll} p\ if\ undirected \\ 2p\ if\ directed \end{array}\right. }
\end{aligned}$$
(3.10)
$$C_{i} \rightarrow 0$$ as $$|V| \rightarrow \infty $$

The clustering coefficient of $$G_{n,p}$$ is small. As the graph gets

bigger with fixed $$\overline{k}$$, C decreases with |V|.

3.2.1.5 Diameter

The path length is O(log|V|) and the diameter is

$$O(\frac{log|V|}{\alpha })$$ where $$\alpha $$ denotes the
expansion of $$G_{n,p}$$.

A graph G(V, E) has expansion $$\alpha $$ if

$$\begin{aligned} \begin{aligned} \forall S \subseteq V:\ number\ of\
edges\ leaving\ S \ge \alpha \ min(|S|,|V\setminus S|) \\ \implies \alpha =
min_{S \subseteq V} \frac{number\ of\ edges\ leaving\ S}
{min(|S|,|V\setminus S|)} \end{aligned} \end{aligned}$$
(3.11)

3.2.2 Drawbacks of G n, p
The exercise in this chapter will require the computations of the real world
graph and the $$G_{n,p}$$.

These computations will show that the degree distribution of

$$G_{n,p}$$ greatly differs from that of real-world ones. The giant
component in most real-world networks does not emerge through phase
transition, and the clustering coefficient of $$G_{n,p}$$ is too low.

3.2.3 Advantages of $$G_{n,p}$$

In spite of these drawbacks, $$G_{n,p}$$ acts as an extremely useful

null model which assists in the computation of quantities that can be
compared with real data, and helps us understand to what degree a
particular property is the result of some random process.

3.3 Bollobás Configuration Model

Béla Bollobás is a British-Hungarian mathematician who proposed this
configuration model to generate random graphs. For a graph G(V, E), let
$$d\in \mathbb {N}$$ and $$|V| > d$$ such that |V|d is even. This
model starts with a uniform random d-regular graph on |V| vertices, and
proceeds by the following steps.

1. 1.

Start with |V| vertices and draw d half-edges emanating from each of
these vertices, so that the ends of these half-edges are all distinct.

2. 2.

Let W be the set of ends of these half-edges. Index these ends by

$$|V|\times d$$, where (i,1), (i,2), $$\ldots $$, (i,d) are the ends
emanating from vertex i. Now choose a random matching
$$\mathscr {M}$$ of the set W of ends (uniformly at random from
the set of all matchings of W) and use the edges of the random
matching to join these pairs of half-edges to produce an edge. This
 edge could be a self-edge if the matching $$\mathscr {M}$$ joins
two half-edges that emanate from the same vertex, or a multiple edge
if the matching has another edge between the same two vertices.

3. 3.

Repeat this process of matching half-edges until all pairs of half-edges

have been paired. This generates a d-regular graph on |V|.

Figure 3.3 gives an instance of a random graph generated on $$d = 3$$

and $$|V| = 4$$.

../images/462433_1_En_3_Chapter/462433_1_En_3_Fig3_HTML.
gif
Fig. 3.3

A random graph generated using Bollobás configuration model

with $$d = 3$$ and $$|V| = 4$$

Let $$G^{*}(|V|,d)$$ denote the random d-regular graph produced by

this process. However, it is not a uniform random graph. The probability
that a particular graph arises depends on the number of loops and on the
multiplicities of the edges. The probability that a graph generated using this
process is simple is as given in Eq. 3.12.
$$\begin{aligned} P \{G^{*}(|V|,d)\ is\ simple \} \rightarrow e^{\frac{-
(d^{2}-1)}{4}}\ as\ |V| \rightarrow \infty \end{aligned}$$
(3.12)

3.4 Permutation Model

The permutation model also generates a random graph. It starts with |V|
vertices and picks d permutations, $$\sigma _{1}$$, $$\sigma _{2}$$,
$$\ldots $$, $$\sigma _{d}$$, uniformly at random from the symmetric
group $$S_{n}$$, with replacement. For each $$l\in d$$ and each
 $$i\in |V|$$, join i to $$\sigma _{i}$$ (forming a loop if
$$\sigma _{l}(i) = i$$). This produces a random (2d)-regular graph
which is commonly denoted as $$R^{*}(|V|,2d)$$.

The graph is simple if and only if the following conditions are satisfied,

1. 1.

None of the permutations have any fixed points.

2. 2.

None of the permutations have any 2-cycles.

3. 3.

No two permutations agree anywhere.

The probability that this graph is simple as given in Eq. 3.13.

$$\begin{aligned} P \{ R^{*}(|V|,2d)\ is\ simple \} \rightarrow e^{-
d}e^{-2d}e^{-{d \atopwithdelims ()2}} = e^{\frac{-d^{2}}{2-d}}\ as\ |V|
\rightarrow \infty \end{aligned}$$
(3.13)
The proof for Eqs. 3.12, 3.13 and other properties of graphs generated
using Bollobás or Permutation models can be found in [1].

3.5 Random Graphs with Prescribed Degree

Sequences
Reference [2] describes several algorithms used to uniformly generate
random graphs with prescribed degree sequences to be used as model of
complex networks. Comparing an observed network to an ensemble of such
graphs allows us to detect deviations from randomness in network
properties.

3.5.1 Switching Algorithm

This algorithm uses a Markov chain to generate a random graph with a

given degree sequence. Here, we start from a given random network and
carry out a series of Monte Carlo switching steps whereby a pair of edges (
$$A\rightarrow B$$, $$C\rightarrow D$$) is selected at random and the
ends are exchanged to give ( $$A\rightarrow D$$, $$C\rightarrow B$$).
The exchange is only performed if no self-edges or multiple edges occur.
Otherwise, it is not performed. The entire process is repeated some number
Q|E| times where $$Q\in \mathbb {N}$$ is chosen large enough so that
the Markov chain shows good mixing. As with many Markov chain
methods, this method suffers because in general we have no measure of
how long to wait for proper mixing. Reference [2] states that empirically
$$Q = 100$$ appears to be adequate.

3.5.2 Matching Algorithm

In this algorithm, each vertex is assigned a set of half-edges according to a

desired degree sequence. Then, a pair of half-edges are picked randomly
and joined up to create the edges of the graph. If self-edges or multiple
edges are created, the entire graph is discarded and the process starts over
from scratch.

This process will correctly generate random graphs with desired properties.
However, the expected number of edges between two vertices will often
exceed one. This makes it unlikely that the procedure will run to
completion except in the rarest of cases. To obviate this problem, a
modification of the method can be used in which following selection of a
pair of half-edges that create a multiple edge, instead of discarding the
graph, an alternate half-edge pair is randomly selected. Although the
method generates a biased sample of possible graphs, not significantly
serving the required purpose.

3.5.3 “Go with the Winners” Algorithm

The “go with the winners” algorithm is a non-Markov chain Monte Carlo
method for sampling uniformly from a given distribution. Consider a
colony of M graphs. Start with the appropriate number of half-edges for
each vertex and repeatedly choose at random a pair of half-edges and link
them to create an edge. If a multiple edge or self-edge is generated, the
graph containing it is removed from the colony and discarded. To
compensate for the resulting slow decline in the size of the colony, its size
is periodically doubled by cloning each of the surviving graphs; this
cloning step is carried out at a predetermined rate chosen to keep the size of
the colony roughly constant on average. This process is repeated until all
half-edges have been linked, then one of the graphs is chosen at random
from the colony and assigned a weight
$$\begin{aligned} W_{i} = 2^{-c}\frac{m}{M} \end{aligned}$$
where c is the number of cloning steps made and m is the number of
surviving graphs. The mean of any quantity X over a set of such graphs is
$$\begin{aligned} \frac{\sum \limits _{i}W_{i}X_{i}}{\sum \limits
_{i}W_{i}} \end{aligned}$$
where $$X_{i}$$ is the value of X in the ith graph.

3.5.4 Comparison

Switching algorithm (Sect. 3.5.1):

Samples the configurations uniformly, generating each graph an

equal number of times within measurement error on calculation.

Produces results essentially identical to but faster than “go with

the winners” algorithm.

Matching algorithm (Sect. 3.5.2):

Introduces a bias and undersamples the configurations.

Faster than the other two methods but samples in a measurable

biased way.

“Go with the winners” algorithm (Sect. 3.5.3):

 Produces an equal number of graphs which are more statistically
correct by sampling ensembles uniformly within permissible
error.

Far less computationally efficient than the other two methods.

From these points it is evident that any of these methods are adequate for
generating suitable random graphs to act as null models. Although the “go
with the winners” and the switching algorithms, while slower, are clearly
more satisfactory theoretically, the matching algorithm gives better results
on real-world problems.

Reference [2] argues in favour of using the switching method, with the “go
with the winners” method finding limited use as a check on the accuracy of
sampling.

Reference [3] shows how using generating functions, one can calculate
exactly many of the statistical properties of random graphs generated from
prescribed degree sequences in the limit of the number of vertices.
Additionally, the position at which the giant component forms, the size of
the giant component, the average and the distribution of the size of the
other components, average number of vertices at certain distance from a
given vertex, the clustering coefficient and the typical vertex-vertex
distances are explained in detail.

Problems
Download the Astro Physics collaboration network from the SNAP dataset
repository available at http://snap.stanford.edu/data/ca-AstroPh.html. This
co-authorship network contains 18772 nodes and 198110 edges.

Generate the graph for this dataset (we will refer to this graph as the real
world graph).

25
Erdös–Rényi random graph (G(n, m): Generate a random instance of this
model by using the number of nodes and edges as the real world graph.

26

Configuration model random graph: Generate a random instance of this

model by using the graph in the dataset.

For each of the real world graph, Erdös–Rényi graph and Cofiguration
model graph, compute the following:

27

Degree distributions

28

Shortest path length distributions

29

Clustering coefficient distributions

30

WCC size distributions

31

For each of these distributions, state whether or not the random models
have the same property as the real world graph.

32

Are the random graph generators capable of generating graphs that are
representative of real world graphs?
References

1. 1.
Ellis, David. 2011. The expansion of random regular graphs, Lecture
notes. Lent.
2. 2.
Milo, Ron, Nadav Kashtan, Shalev Itzkovitz, Mark E.J. Newman, and
Uri Alon. 2003. On the uniform generation of random graphs with
prescribed degree sequences. arXiv:cond-mat/0312028.
3. 3.
Newman, Mark E.J., Steven H. Strogatz, and Duncan J. Watts. 2001.
Random graphs with arbitrary degree distributions and their
applications. Physical Review E 64(2):026118.
4. 4.
Paul, Erdös, and Rényi Alfréd . 1959. On random graphs, i.
Publicationes Mathematicae (Debrecen) 6: 290–297.
5. 5.
Paul, Erdös, and Rényi Alfréd. 1960. On the evolution of random
graphs. Publications of the Mathematical Institute of the Hungarian
Academy of Sciences 5: 17–61.
© Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2018
Krishna Raj P.M., Ankith Mohan and K.G. SrinivasaPractical Social
Network Analysis with PythonComputer Communications and
Networkshttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-96746-2_4

4. Small World Phenomena

Krishna Raj P. M.1 , Ankith Mohan1 and K. G. Srinivasa2
(1)
Department of ISE, Ramaiah Institute of Technology, Bangalore,
Karnataka, India
(2)
Department of Information Technology, C.B.P. Government Engineering
College, Jaffarpur, Delhi, India

Krishna Raj P. M.
Email: krishnarajpm@gmail.com

We have all had the experience of encountering someone far from home,
who turns out to share a mutual acquaintance with us. Then comes the
cliché, “My it’s a small world”. Similarly, there exists a speculative idea
that the distance between vertices in a very large graph is surprisingly
small, i.e, the vertices co-exist in a “small world”. Hence the term small
world phenomena.

Is it surprising that such a phenomenon can exist? If each person is

connected to 100 people, then at the first step 100 people can be reached,
the next step reaches $$10^{4}$$ people, $$10^{6}$$ at the third step,
$$10^{8}$$ at the fourth step and $$10^{10}$$ at the fifth step.
Taking into account the fact that there are only 7.6 billion people in the
world as of December 2017, the six degrees of separation is not at all
surprising. However, many of the 100 people a person is connected to may
be connected to one another. Due to the presence of this overlap in
connections, the five steps between every inhabitant of the Earth is a
longshot.

4.1 Small World Experiment

Stanley Milgram, an American social psychologist aimed at answering the
following question: “Given two individuals selected randomly from the
population, what is the probability that the minimum number of
intermediaries required to link them is $$0, 1, 2, \ldots , k$$?” [16]. This
led to his famous “small-world” experiment [15] which contained two
studies. The first study, called the “Kansas study” recruited residents from
Wichita, Kansas and the next study, called the “Nebraska study” involved
volunteers from Omaha, Nebraska. The targets for these studies were
located in Massachusetts. The authors particularly selected the volunteers
from these two cities because from a psychological perspective, they are
very far away from the target’s location. The target for the Kansas study
was the wife of a divinity student living in Cambridge, MA and that for the
Nebraska study was a stockbroker who worked in Boston and lived in
Sharon, MA.

The volunteers were sent a folder containing a document and a set of tracer
cards, with the name and some relevant information concerning their target.
The following rules were set: (i) The subjects could only send the folder to
individuals they knew on a first-name basis. If the subject did not know the
target on this basis, they could send it to only one other person who
qualified this condition and was more likely to know the target. (ii) The
folder contained a roster on which the subject and all subsequent recipients
had to write their name. This roster tells the recipients all the people who
were part of this chain and thereby prevents endless loop. (iii) Every
participant had to fill out in the tracer card the relationship of the person
they are sending it to, and send it back to the authors. This helped the
authors keep track of the complete and incomplete links.

Kansas Study

The Kansas study started with 145 participants which shows a certain
pattern: 56 of the chains involved a female sending the folder to another
female, 58 of them involved a male sending the folder to a male, 18 of
them involved a female sending the folder to a male, and 13 of the chains
had a male passing the folder to a female. This shows a three times greater
tendency for a same-gender passing. 123 of these participants were
observed to send the folder to friends and acquaintances while the other 22
sent the folder to relatives. However, the authors indicate that this
preference towards friends could be exclusive to the participants and this
does not necessarily generalize to the public.

Nebraska Study

The starting population for the Nebraska study was: 296 people were
selected, 100 of them were people residing in Boston designated as the
“Boston random” group, 100 were blue chip stock holders from Nebraska,
and 96 were randomly chosen Nebraska inhabitants called the “Nebraska
random” group. Only 64 chains ( $$29\%$$) completed, with $$24\%$$
by “Nebraska random”, $$31\%$$ by Nebraska stockholder and
$$35\%$$ by “Boston random”. There were 453 participants who made
up the intermediaries solicited by other participants as people likely to
extend the chains towards the target. Similar to the Kansas study,
$$86\%$$ of the participants sent the folders to friends or acquaintances,
and the rest to relatives. Men were ten times more likely to send the
document to other men than to women, while women were equally likely to
send the folder to males as to females. These results were probably affected
by the fact that the target was male.

Figure 4.1 shows that the average number of intermediaries on the path of
the folders was between 4.4 and 5.7, depending on the sample of people
chosen. The average number of intermediaries in these chains was 5.2, with
considerable difference between the Boston group (4.4) and the rest of the
starting population, whereas the difference between the two other sub-
populations were not statistically significant. The random group from
Nebraska needed 5.7 intermediaries on average. On average, 6.2 steps to
make it to the target. Hence the expression “six degrees of separation”. The
main conclusion was that the average path length is much smaller than
expected, and that geographic location has an impact on the average length
whereas other information, such as profession, did not. It was also observed
that some chains moved from Nebraska to the target’s neighbourhood but
then goes round in circles never making contact to complete the chain. So,
social communication is restricted less by physical distance than by social
distance. Additionally, a funnelling-like phenomenon was observed because
$$48\%$$ of chains in the last link passed through only 3 of the target’s
acquaintances. Thereby, showing that not all individuals in a person’s circle
are equally likely to be selected as the next node in a chain.

../images/462433_1_En_4_Chapter/462433_1_En_4_Fig1_HTML.
gif
Fig. 4.1

Frequency distribution of the number of intermediaries required

to reach the target

Figure 4.2 depicts the distribution of the incomplete chains. The median of
this distributions is found to be 2.6. There are two probable reasons for this:
(i) Participants are not motivated enough to participate in this study. (ii)
Participants do not know to whom they must send the folder in order to
advance the chain towards the target.

../images/462433_1_En_4_Chapter/462433_1_En_4_Fig2_HTML.
gif
Fig. 4.2

Frequency distribution of the intermediate chains

The authors conclude from this study that although each and every
individual is embedded in a small-world structure, not all acquaintances are
equally important. Some are more important than others in establishing
contacts with broader social realms because while some are relatively
isolated, others possess a wide circle of acquaintances.

What is of interest is that Milgram measured the average length of the

routing path on the social network, which is an upper bound on the average
distance (as the participants were not necessarily sending postcards to an
acquaintance on the shortest path to the target). These results prove that
although the world is small, the actors in this small world are unable to
exploit this smallness.

Although the idea of the six degrees of separation gained quick and wide
acceptance, there is empirical evidence which suggests that we actually live
in a world deeply divided by social barriers such as race and class.

Income Stratification

Reference [3] in a variation of the small world study, probably sent to

Milgram for review, not only showed extremely low chain completion rates
(below $$18\%$$) but also suggested that people are actually separated
by social class. This study consisted of 151 volunteers from Crestline,
Ohio, divided into low-income, middle-income and high-income groups.
These volunteers were to try to reach a low-income, middle-income and
high-income person in Los Angeles, California. While the chain
completion rate was too low to permit statistical comparison of subgroups,
no low-income sender was able to complete chains to targets other than the
low-income target groups. The middle and high income groups did get
messages through to some people in every other income group. These
patterns suggest a world divided by social class, with low-income people
disconnected.

Acquaintance Networks

Milgram’s study of acquaintance networks [11] between racial groups also

reveals not only a low rate of chain completion but also the importance of
social barriers. Caucasian volunteers in Los Angeles, solicited through
mailing lists, were asked to reach both Caucasian and African-American
targets in New York. Of the 270 chains started and directed towards
African-American targets, only $$13\%$$ got through compared to
$$33\%$$ of 270 chains directed towards Caucasian targets.

Social Stratification

Reference [13] investigated a single urbanized area in the Northeast. The

research purpose was to examine social stratification, particularly barriers
between Caucasians and African-Americans. Of the 596 packets sent to
298 volunteers, 375 packets were forwarded and 112 eventually reached the
target—a success rate of $$30\%$$. The authors concluded that,

Communication flows mainly within racial groups. Crossing the

racial boundary is less likely to be attempted and less likely to be
effective.

Urban Myth

Reference [10] speculates that the six degrees of separation may be an

academic equivalent of an urban myth. In Psychology Today, Milgram
recalls that the target in Cambridge received the folder on the fourth day
since the start of the study, with two intermediaries between the target and a
Kansas wheat farmer. However, an undated paper found in Milgram’s
archives, “Results of Communication Project”, reveals that 60 people had
been recruited as the starting population from a newspaper advertisement in
Wichita. Just 3 of the 60 folders ( $$5\%$$) reached the lady in
Cambridge, passing through an average of 8 people (9 degrees of
separation). The stark contrast between the anecdote and the paper
questions the phenomenon.

Bias in Selection of Starting Population

Milgram’s starting population has several advantages: The starting

population had social advantages, they were far from a representative
group. The “Nebraska random” group and the stock holders from Nebraska
were recruited from a mailing list apt to contain names of high income
people, and the “Boston random” group were recruited from a newspaper
advertisement. All of these selected would have had an advantage in
making social connections to the stockbroker.

The Kansas advertisement was worded in a way to particularly attract

sociable people proud of their social skills and confident of their powers to
reach someone across class barriers, instead of soliciting a representative
group to participate. This could have been done to ensure that the
participants by virtue of their inherent social capital could increase the
probability of the folder reaching the target with the least amount of
intermediaries.
Milgram recruited subjects for Nebraska and Los Angeles studies by
buying mailing lists. People with names worth selling (who would
commonly occur in mailing lists) are more likely to be high-income people,
who are more connected and thus more apt to get the folders through.

Reference [10] questions whether Milgram’s low success rates results from
people not bothering to send the folder or does it reveal that the theory is
incorrect. Or do some people live in a small, small world where they can
easily reach people across boundaries while others do not. Further, the
paper suggests that the research on the small world problem may be a
familiar pattern:

We live in a world where social capital, the ability to make

personal connections, is not widespread and more apt to be a
possession of high income, Caucasian people or people with
exceptional social intelligence. Certainly some people operate in
small worlds such as scientists with worldwide connections or
university administrators. But many low-income or minority
people do not seem to. What the empirical evidence suggests is
that some people are well-connected while others are not. A
world not of elegant mathematical patterns where a random
connector can zap us together but a more prosaic world, a lot like
a bowl of lumpy oatmeal.

Results and Commentaries

People who owned stock had shorter paths (5.4) to stockbrokers than
random people (6.7). People from Boston area have even closer paths (4.4).
Only 31 out of the 64 chains passed through one of three people as their
final step, thus not all vertices and edges are equal. The sources and target
were non-random. 64 is not a sufficiently large sample to base a conclusion
on. $$25\%$$ of the approached refused to participate. It was commonly
thought that people would find the shortest path to the target but the
experiment revealed that they instead used additional information to form a
strategy.

When Milgram first published his results, he offered two opposing

interpretations of what this six degrees of separation actually meant. On the
one hand, he observed that such a distance is considerably smaller than
what one would naturally intuit. But at the same time, Milgram noted that
this result could also be interpreted to mean that people are on average six
worlds apart:

When we speak of five intermediaries, we are talking about an

enormous psychological distance between the starting and target
points, a distance which seems smaller only because we
customarily regard five as a small manageable quantity. We
should think of the two points as being not five persons apart, but
five circles of acquaintances apart—five structures apart.

Despite all this, the experiment and the resulting phenomena have formed a
crucial aspect in our understanding of social networks. The conclusion has
been accepted in the broad sense: social networks tend to have very short
paths between essentially arbitrary pairs of people. The existence of these
short paths has substantial consequences for the potential speed with which
information, diseases, and other kinds of contagion can spread through
society, as well as for the potential access that the social network provides
to opportunities and to people with very different characteristics from one’s
own.

This gives us the small world property , networks of size n have diameter
O(logn), meaning that between any two nodes there exists a path of size
O(logn).

4.2 Columbia Small World Study

All studies concerning large-scale social networks focused either on non-
social networks or on crude proxies of social interactions. To buck this
trend, Dodds, Muhamad and Watts, sociologists at Columbia University,
performed a global, Internet-based social search experiment [4] to
investigate the small world phenomenon in 2003. In this experiment,
participants registered online and were randomly assigned one of 18 targets
of various backgrounds from 13 countries. This was done to remove biases
concerning race, gender, nationality, profession, etc. Participants were
asked to help relay an email to their allocated target by forwarding it to
social acquaintances whom they considered closer than themselves to the
target. Of the 98847 individuals who had registered, about $$25\%$$ had
initiated chains. Because subsequent senders were effectively recruited by
their own acquaintances, the participation rate after the first step increased
to an average of $$37\%$$. Including the initial and subsequent senders,
data were recorded on 61168 individuals from 166 countries, constituting
24163 distinct message chains. The sender had to provide a description of
how he or she had come to know the person, alongwith the type and
strength of the resulting relationship.

The study observed the following: When passing messages, the senders
typically used friendships in preference to business or family ties.
Successful chains in comparison with incomplete chains disproportionately
involved professional ties (33.9 versus $$13.2\%$$) rather than
friendship and familial relationships (59.8 versus $$83.4\%$$). Men
passed messages more frequently to other men ( $$57\%$$) and women
to other women ( $$61\%$$) and this tendency to pass to a same gender
contact was strengthened by about $$3\%$$ if the target was the same
gender as the sender and similarly weakened in the opposite case. Senders
were also asked why they considered their nominated acquaintance a
suitable recipient. Geographical proximity of acquaintance to target and
similarity of occupation accounted for atleast half of all choices. Presence
of highly connected individuals appear to have limited relevance to any
kind of social search involved in this experiment. Participants relatively
rarely nominated an acquaintance primarily because he or she had more
friends, and individuals in successful chains were far less likely than those
in incomplete chains to send messages to hubs (1.6 versus $$8.2\%$$).
There was no observation of message funneling : at most $$5\%$$ of
messages passed through a single acquaintance of any target, and
$$95\%$$ of all chains were completed through individuals who
delivered atmost 3 messages. From these observations, the study concluded
that social search is an egalitarian exercise, not one whose success depends
on a small minority of exceptional individuals.

Although the average participation rate was $$37\%$$, compounding

effects of attrition over multiple links resulted in exponential attenuation of
chains as a function of their length and therefore leading to an extremely
low chain completion rate. Only a mere 384 of 24163 chains reached their
targets. There were three reasons for the termination of chains: (i)
randomly, because of an individual’s apathy or disinclination to participate,
(ii) chains get lost or are otherwise unable to reach their target, at longer
chain lengths, (iii) individuals nearer the target are more likely to continue
the chain, especially at shorter chain lengths. However, the random-failure
hypothesis gained traction because with the exception of the first step, the
attrition rates remain almost constant for all chain lengths at which there is
sufficiently large N, and the senders who didn’t forward their messages
after a buffer time were asked why they hadn’t participated. Less than
$$0.3\%$$ of those contacted claimed that they couldn’t think of an
appropriate recipient, suggesting that lack of interest or incentive, not
difficulty, was the main reason for chain termination.

The aggregate of the 384 completed chains across targets (Fig. 4.3) gives us
an average length of 4.05 as shown in Fig. 4.4.

../images/462433_1_En_4_Chapter/462433_1_En_4_Fig3_HTML.
gif
Fig. 4.3

Average per-step attrition rates (circles) and $$95\%$$

confidence interval (triangles)

../images/462433_1_En_4_Chapter/462433_1_En_4_Fig4_HTML.
gif
Fig. 4.4

Histogram representing the number of chains that are completed

in L steps

However, this number is misleading because it represents an average only

over the completed chains, and shorter chains are more likely to be
computed. To correct for the $$65\%$$ dropout per step, the ideal
frequency distribution of chain lengths, $$n'(L)$$, i.e, chain lengths that
would be observed in hypothetical limit of zero attrition, may be estimated
by accounting for observed attrition as shown in Eq. 4.1.
$$\begin{aligned} n'(L) = \frac{n(L)}{\prod \limits _{i=0}^{L-1}(1-
r_{i})} \end{aligned}$$
(4.1)
where n(L) is the observed number of chains completed in L steps and
$$r_{L}$$ is the max-likelihood attrition rate from step L to $$L+1$$.
Figure 4.5 shows the histogram of the corrected number of chains with a
poorly specified tail of the distribution, due to the small number of
observed chains at large L. This gives us the median, $$L_{*} = 7$$, the
typical ideal chain length for the hypothetical average individual. For
chains that started and ended in the same country, $$L_{*} = 5$$, or in
different countries, $$L_{*} = 7$$.

../images/462433_1_En_4_Chapter/462433_1_En_4_Fig5_HTML.
gif
Fig. 4.5

“Ideal” histogram of chain lengths in Fig. 4.4 by accounting for

message attrition in Fig. 4.3

The study finds that successful chains are due to intermediate to weak
strength ties. It does not require highly connected hubs to succeed but
instead relies on professional relationships. Small variations in chain
lengths and participation rates generate large differences in target
reachability. Although global social networks are searchable, actual success
depends on individual incentives. Since individuals have only limited, local
information about global social networks, finding short paths represents a
non-trivial search effort.

On the one hand, all the targets may be reachable from random initial
seeders in only a few steps, with surprisingly little variation across targets
in different countries and professions. On the other hand, small differences
in either the participation rates or the underlying chain lengths can have a
dramatic impact on the apparent reachability of the different targets.
Therefore, the results suggest that if the individuals searching for remote
targets do not have sufficient incentives to proceed, the small-world
hypothesis will not appear to hold, but that even the slightest increase in
incentives can render social searches successful under broad conditions.
The authors add that,

Experimental approach adopted here suggests that empirically

observed network structures can only be meaningfully interpreted
in light of actions, strategies and even perceptions of the
individuals embedded in the network: Network structure alone is
not everything.

4.3 Small World in Instant Messaging

Reference [5] analyzed a month of anonymized high-level communication
activities within the whole of the Microsoft Messenger instant-messaging
system. This study was aimed at examining the characteristics and patterns
that emerge from the collective dynamics of a large number of people,
rather than the actions and characteristics of individuals. The resulting
undirected communication graph contained 240 million active user
accounts represented as nodes and there is an edge between two users if
they engaged in a two-way conversation at any point during the observation
period. This graph turned out to have a giant component containing almost
all of the nodes, and the distances within this giant component were very
small. Indeed, the distances in the Instant Messenger network closely
corresponded to the numbers from Milgram’s experiment, with an
estimated average distance of 6.6, and an estimated median of 7 (as seen in
Fig. 4.6). This study containing more than two million times larger than
[15], gives “seven degrees of separation”. There are longer paths with
lengths up to 29. A random sample of 1000 users was chosen and breadth-
first search was performed from each of these separately. The reason for
this sampling is because the graph was so large that performing breadth-
first search from each and every one of these users would have taken an
astronomical amount of time.

../images/462433_1_En_4_Chapter/462433_1_En_4_Fig6_HTML.
gif
Fig. 4.6

Distribution of shortest path lengths

4.4 Erdös Number
A similar phenomenon is observed in collaborations among researchers.
The most popular one is the Erdös number. In the collaboration graph of
mathematicians as vertices and an edge between mathematicians if they
have co-authored a paper, the Erdös number is the distance between a
mathematician and Erdös. Figure 4.7 shows a small hand-drawn piece of
the collaboration graph, with paths leading to Paul Erdös. The highlight is
that most mathematicians have an Erdös number of atmost 5 and if
scientists of other fields were included, it is atmost 6.

../images/462433_1_En_4_Chapter/462433_1_En_4_Fig7_HTML.
gif
Fig. 4.7

A hand-drawn picture of a collaboration graph between various

researchers. Most prominent is Erdös

4.5 Bacon Number

The compelling belief that the American actor and musician, Kevin Bacon
was at the center of the Hollywood universe, led three college students to
adapt the Erdös number into the Bacon number. Here, a collaboration graph
has Hollywood performers as nodes and edge between nodes indicates that
the performers have appeared in a movie. The Bacon number of a
performer gives the number of steps to Kevin Bacon. The average is 2.9
and there is a challenge to find one that is greater than 5. (there is one with
Bacon number 8 that involves a 1928 Soviet pirate movie). Only
$$12\%$$ of all performers cannot be linked to Bacon. There is also a
computer game called the “Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon”, where players
are required to find the shortest path between an arbitrary actor and Kevin
Bacon.

4.6 Decentralized Search

Given a graph, s has to send a message to t, passing it along the edges of
this graph, so that the least number of steps is taken. s only knows the
location of its neighbours as well as the location of the target t, and does
not know the neighbours of anyone else except itself. Each vertex has its
local information, i.e, a vertex u in a given step has knowledge of:

1. 1.

The set of local contacts among among all the vertices

2. 2.

The location of the target t

3. 3.

The locations and long-range contacts of all the vertices who were part
of this message chain

Given this information, u must choose one of its contacts v to pass on the
message.

4.7 Searchable
A graph is said to be searchable or navigable if its diameter is
$$O((log|V|)^{\beta })$$, i.e, the expected delivery time of a
decentralized algorithm is polylogarithmic. Therefore, a non-searchable or
a non-navigable graph is one which has a diameter of
$$O(|V|^{\alpha })$$, i.e, the expected delivery time of a decentralized
algorithm is not polylogarithmic.

In other words, a graph is searchable if the vertices are capable of directing

messages through other vertices to a specific vertex in only a few hops.
4.8 Other Small World Studies
Small World in an Interviewing Bureau

Reference [7] conducted a small-world study where they analysed 10, 920
shortest path connections and small-world routes between 105 members of
an interviewing bureau. They observed that the mean small-world path
length (3.23) is $$40\%$$ longer than the mean of the actual shortest
paths (2.30), showing that mistakes are prevalent. A Markov model with a
probability of simply guessing an intermediary of 0.52 gives an excellent fit
to these observations, thus concluding that people make the wrong small-
world choice more than half the time.

Reverse Small World Study

Reference [6] attempted to examine and define the network of a typical

individual by discovering how many of her acquaintances could be used as
first steps in a small-world procedure, and for what reasons. The starting
population were provided background information about each of 1267
targets in the small-world experiment and asked to write down their choice,
amongst the people they knew, for the first link in a potential chain from
them to each of these targets. The subjects provided information on each
choice made and the reason that choice had been made. The reason could
be in one or more of four categories: something about the location of the
target caused the subject to think of her choice; the occupation of the target
was responsible for the choice; the ethnicity of the target; or some other
reason.

The study drew the following conclusions. First, a mean of 210 choices per
subject. However, only 35 choices are necessary to account for half the
world. Of the 210, 95 ( $$45\%$$) were chosen most often for location
reasons, 99 ( $$47\%$$) were chosen most often for occupation reasons,
and only $$7\%$$ of the choices were mainly based on ethnicity or other
reasons. Second, the choices were mostly friends and acquaintances, and
not family. For any given target, about $$82\%$$ of the time, a male is
likely to be chosen, unless both subject and target are female, or if the
target has a low-status occupation. Over $$64\%$$ of the time, this trend
appears even when female choices are more likely. Lastly, the order of the
reasons given were: location, occupation and ethnicity.

The authors conclude that the strong similarity between predictions from
these results and the results of [16] suggests that the experiment is an
adequate proxy for behavior.

4.9 Case Studies

4.9.1 HP Labs Email Network

Reference [1] simulates small-world experiments on HP Lab email

network, to evaluate how participants in a small world experiment are able
to find short paths in a social network using only local information about
their immediate contacts.

In the HP Lab network, a social graph is generated where the employees

are the vertices and the there is an edge between vertices if there has been
atleast 6 emails exchanged between the corresponding employees during
the period of the study. Mass emails such as announcements sent to more
than 10 individuals at once were removed to minimize likelihood of one-
sided communications. With these conditions, Fig. 4.8 shows the graph
having 430 vertices with a median of 10 edges and a mean of 12.9. The
degree distribution, Fig. 4.9, is highly skewed with an exponential tail.
Here, each individual can use knowledge only of their own email contacts,
but not their contacts’ contacts, to forward the message. In order to avoid
loops, the participants append their names to the message as they receive it.

../images/462433_1_En_4_Chapter/462433_1_En_4_Fig8_HTML.
gif
Fig. 4.8

Email communication between employees of HP Lab

../images/462433_1_En_4_Chapter/462433_1_En_4_Fig9_HTML.
gif
Fig. 4.9
 Degree distribution of HP Lab network

The first strategy involved sending the message to an individual who is

more likely to know the target by virtue of the fact that he or she knows a
lot of people. Reference [2] has shown that this strategy is effective in
networks with power law distribution with exponent close to 2. However,
as seen in Fig. 4.9, this network does not have a power law, but rather an
exponential tail, more like a Poisson distribution. Reference [2] also shows
that this strategy performs poorly in the case of Poisson distribution. The
simulation confirms this with a median of 16 and an average of 43 steps
required between two randomly chosen vertices.

The second strategy consists of passing messages to the contact closest to

the target in the organizational hierarchy. In the simulation, the individuals
are given full knowledge of organizational hierarchy but they have no
information about contacts of individuals except their own. Here, the search
is tracked via the hierarchical distance (h-distance) between vertices. The
h-distance is computed as follows: individuals have h-distance 1 to their
manager and everyone they share a manager with. Then, the distances are
recursively assigned, i.e, h-distance of 2 to their first neighbour’s
neighbour, 3 to their second neighbour’s neighbour, and so on. This
strategy seems to work pretty well as shown in Figs. 4.10 and 4.11. The
median number of steps was only 4, close to the median shortest path of 3.
The mean was 5 steps, slightly higher than the median because of the
presence of a four hard to find individuals who had only a single link.
Excluding these 4 individuals as targets resulted in a mean of 4.5 steps.
This result indicates that not only are people typically easy to find, but
nearly everybody can be found in a reasonable number of steps.

../images/462433_1_En_4_Chapter/462433_1_En_4_Fig10_HTML.
gif
Fig. 4.10

Probability of linking as a function of the hierarchical distance

 ../images/462433_1_En_4_Chapter/462433_1_En_4_Fig11_HTML.
gif
Fig. 4.11

Probability of linking as a function of the size of the smallest

organizational unit individuals belong to

The last strategy was based on the target’s physical location. Individuals’
locations are given by their building, the floor of the building, and the
nearest building post to their cubicle. Figure 4.12 shows the email
correspondence mapped onto the physical layout of the buildings. The
general tendency of individuals in close physical proximity to correspond
holds: over $$87\%$$ percent of the 4000 emails are between individuals
on the same floor. From Fig. 4.13, we observe that geography could be
used to find most individuals, but was slower, taking a median number of 6
steps, and a mean of 12.

../images/462433_1_En_4_Chapter/462433_1_En_4_Fig12_HTML.
gif
Fig. 4.12

Email communication mapped onto approximate physical

location. Each block represents a floor in a building. Blue lines
represent far away contacts while red ones represent nearby ones

../images/462433_1_En_4_Chapter/462433_1_En_4_Fig13_HTML.
gif
Fig. 4.13

Probability of two individuals corresponding by email as a

function of the distance between their cubicles. The inset shows
how many people in total sit at a given distance from one another

The study concludes that individuals are able to successfully complete

chains in small world experiments using only local information. When
individuals belong to groups based on a hierarchy and are more likely to
interact with individuals within the same small group, then one can safely
adopt a greedy strategy—pass the message onto the individual most like the
target, and they will be more likely to know the target or someone closer to
them.

4.9.2 LiveJournal Network

Reference [12] performed a study on the LiveJournal online community, a

social network comprising of 1.3 million bloggers (as of February 2004). A
blog is an online diary, often updated daily, typically containing reports on
the user’s personal life, reactions to world events, and commentary on other
blogs. In the LiveJournal system, each blogger also explicitly provides a
profile, including geographical location among other information, and a list
of other bloggers whom he or she considers to be a friend. Of these 1.3
million bloggers, there were about half a million in the continental United
States who listed a hometown and state which could be mapped to a
latitude and a longitude. Thus, the discussion of routing was from the
perspective of reaching the home town or city of the destination individual.

They defined “u is a friend of v” relationship, by the explicit appearance of

blogger u in the list of friends in the profile of blogger v. Let d(u, v) denote
the geographic distance between u and v. There are about 4 million
friendship links in this directed network, an average of about eight friends
per user. It was observed that $$77.6\%$$ of the graph formed a giant
component. Figure 4.14 depicts the in-degree and the out-degree
distributions for both the full network and the network of the users who
could be geographically mapped. The parabolic shape shows that the
distribution is more log-normal than a power law.

../images/462433_1_En_4_Chapter/462433_1_En_4_Fig14_HTML.
gif
Fig. 4.14

In-degree and out-degree distributions of the LiveJournal

network

They perform a simulated version of the message-forwarding experiment in

the LiveJournal, using only geographic information to choose the next
message holder in a chain. This was to determine whether individuals using
purely geographic information in a simple way can succeed in discovering
short paths to a destination city. This approach using a large-scale network
of real-world friendships but simulating the forwarding of messages,
allowed them to investigate the performance of simple routing schemes
without suffering from a reliance on the voluntary participation of the
people in the network.

In the simulation, messages are forwarded in the following manner: if a

person s currently holds the message and wants to eventually reach a target
t, then she considers her set of friends and chooses as the next step in the
chain the friend in this set who is geographically closest to t. If s is closer to
the target than all of his or her friends, then s gives up, and the chain
terminates. When sources and targets are chosen randomly, we find that the
chain successfully reaches the city of the target in $$\approx {13\%}$$ of
the trials, with a mean completed-chain length of slightly more than four
(as shown in Fig. 4.15).

../images/462433_1_En_4_Chapter/462433_1_En_4_Fig15_HTML.
gif
Fig. 4.15

In each of 500, 000 trials, a source s and target t are chosen

randomly; at each step, the message is forwarded from the
current message-holder u to the friend v of u geographically
closest to t. If $$d(v, t) > d(u, t)$$, then the chain is
considered to have failed. The fraction f(k) of pairs in which the
chain reaches t’s city in exactly k steps is shown ( $$12.78\%$$
chains completed; median 4, $$\mu = 4.12$$,
$$\sigma = 2.54$$ for completed chains). (Inset) For
$$80.16\%$$ completed, median 12, $$\mu = 16.74$$,
$$\sigma = 17.84$$; if $$d(v, t) > d(u, t)$$ then u picks a
random person in the same city as u to pass the message to, and
the chain fails only if there is no such person available.

The authors conclude that, even under restrictive forwarding conditions,

geographic information is sufficient to perform global routing in a
significant fraction of cases. This simulated experiment may be taken as a
lower bound on the presence of short discoverable paths, because only the
on-average eight friends explicitly listed in each LiveJournal profile are
candidates for forwarding. The routing algorithm was modified: an
individual u who has no friend geographically closer to the target instead
forwards the message to a person selected at random from u’s city. Under

this modification, chains complete of the time, with

median length 12 and mean length 16.74 (see Fig. 4.15). The completion
rate is not $$100\%$$ because a chain may still fail by landing at a
location in which no inhabitant has a friend closer to the target. This
modified experiment may be taken as an upper bound on completion rate,
when the simulated individuals doggedly continue forwarding the message
as long as any closer friend exists.

To closely examine the relationship between friendship and geographic

distance, for each distance $$\delta $$, $$P(\delta )$$ denotes the
proportion of pairs u, v separated by distance $$d(u, v) = \delta $$ who
are friends. As $$\delta $$ increases, it is observed that $$P(\delta )$$
decreases, indicating that geographic proximity indeed increases the
probability of friendship (as shown in Fig. 4.16). However, for distances
larger than $$\approx {1,000}$$ km, the $$\delta $$-versus-
$$P(\delta )$$ curve approximately flattens to a constant probability of
friendship between people, regardless of the geographic distance between
them. Figure 4.16 shows that $$P(\delta )$$ flattens to
$$P(\delta ) \approx {5.0} \times 10^{-6}$$ for large distances
$$\delta $$; the background friendship probability $$\epsilon $$
dominates $$f(\delta )$$ for large separations $$\delta $$. It is thus
estimated that $$\epsilon $$ is $$5.0 \times 10^{-6}$$ . This value can
be used to estimate the proportion of friendships in the LiveJournal
network that are formed by geographic and non-geographic processes. The
probability of a non-geographic friendship between u and v is
$$\epsilon $$, so on average u will have $$\approx {2.5}$$ non-
geographic friends. An average person in the LiveJournal network has eight
friends, so $$\approx {5.5}$$ of an average person’s eight friends (
$$69\%$$ of his or her friends) are formed by geographic processes. This
statistic is aggregated across the entire network: no particular friendship
can be tagged as geographic or non-geographic by this analysis; friendship
between distant people is simply more likely (but not guaranteed) to be
generated by the nongeographic process. However, this analysis does
estimate that about two-thirds of LiveJournal friendships are geographic in
nature. Figure 4.16 shows the plot of geographic distance $$\delta $$
versus the geographic-friendship probability
$$f(\delta ) = P(\delta ) - \epsilon $$. The plot shows that $$f(\delta )$$
decreases smoothly as $$\delta $$ increases. This shows that any model
of friendship that is based solely on the distance between people is
insufficient to explain the geographic nature of friendships in the
LiveJournal network.

../images/462433_1_En_4_Chapter/462433_1_En_4_Fig16_HTML.
gif
Fig. 4.16

a For each distance $$\delta $$ , the proportion P( $$\delta $$

) of friendships among all pairs u, v of LiveJournal users with
$$d(u, v) = \delta $$ is shown. The number of pairs u,v with
$$d(u, v) = \delta $$ is estimated by computing the distance
between 10, 000 randomly chosen pairs of people in the network.
b The same data are plotted, correcting for the background
friendship probability: plot distance $$\delta $$ versus
$$P(\delta ) - 5.0 \times 10^{-6}$$

Since, geographic distance alone is insufficient as the basis for a

geographical model, this model uses rank as the key geographic notion:
when examining a friend v of u, the relevant quantity is the number of
people who live closer to u than v does. Formally, the rank of v with respect
to u is defined as given in Eq. 4.2.
$$\begin{aligned} rank_{u}(v) := |\{w: d(u, w) < d(u, v)\}|
\end{aligned}$$
(4.2)
Under the rank-based friendship model, the probability that u and v are
geographic friends is modelled as in Eq. 4.3
 $$\begin{aligned} Pr[u\rightarrow v] \alpha \frac{1}{rank_{u}(v)}
\end{aligned}$$
(4.3)
Under this model, the probability of a link from u to v depends only on the
number of people within distance d(u, v) of u and not on the geographic
distance itself; thus the non-uniformity of LiveJournal population density
fits naturally into this framework.
The relationship between $$rank_{v}(u)$$ and the probability that u is a
friend of v shows an approximately inverse linear fit for ranks up to
$$\approx {100,000}$$ (as shown in Fig. 4.17). An average person in the
network lives in a city of population 1, 306. Thus in Fig. 4.17 the same data
is shown where the probabilities are averaged over a range of 1, 306 ranks.

../images/462433_1_En_4_Chapter/462433_1_En_4_Fig17_HTML.
gif
Fig. 4.17

The relationship between friendship probability and rank. The

probability P(r) of a link from a randomly chosen source u to the
rth closest node to u, i.e, the node v such that
$$rank_{u}(v) = r$$, in the LiveJournal network, averaged
over 10, 000 independent source samples. A link from u to one of
the nodes $$S_{\delta } = \{v:d(u, v) = \delta \}$$, where the
people in $$S_{\delta }$$ are all tied for rank
$$r+1, \ldots , r+|S_{\delta }|$$, is counted as a (
$$\frac{1}{|S_{\delta }|}$$) fraction of a link for each of these
ranks. As before, the value of $$\epsilon $$ represents the
background probability of a friendship independent of geography.
a Data for every 20th rank are shown. b The data are averaged
into buckets of size 1, 306: for each displayed rank r, the average
probability of a friendship over ranks
$$\{r-652, \ldots , r+653\}$$ is shown. c and b The same data
are replotted (unaveraged and averaged, respectively), correcting
for the background friendship probability: we plot the rank r
versus $$P(r) - 5.0 \times 10^{-6}$$
So, message passing in the real-world begins by making long geography-
based hops as the message leaves the source and ends by making hops
based on attributes other than geography. Thus there is a transition from
geography-based to nongeography-based routing at some point in the
process.

4.9.3 Human Wayfinding

Given a network of links between concepts of Wikipedia, [18] studied how

more than 30000 trajectories from 9400 people find the shortest path from a
given start to a given target concept following hyperlinks. Formally, they
studied the game of Wikispeedia in which players (information seekers) are
given two random articles with the aim to solve the task of navigating from
one to the other by clicking as few hyperlinks as possible. However, the
players are given no knowledge of the global structure and must rely solely
on the local information they see on each page—the outgoing links
connecting current articles to its neighbours—and on expectation about
which articles are likely to be interlinked. The players are allowed to use
the back button of the browser at any point in the game. This traversal from
one webpage to another by information seekers is characterized as human
wayfinding.

On first thought, it might obviously occur that each game of Wikispeedia is

an instance of decentralized search. Therefore, employing a decentralized
search algorithm will solve the problem. However, there is a subtle
difference. In a decentralized search problem, each node works with local
information and independently forwards the message to the next node,
forfeiting control to the successor. While in Wikispeedia, although the
information seeker has only local knowledge about the unknown network,
she stays in control all the way and can thus form more elaborate strategies
than in a multi-person scenario.

Human wayfinding is observed to take two approaches. The first approach

is where players attempt to first find a hub. A hub is a high-degree node
that is easily reachable from all over the graph and that has connections to
many regions of this graph. Then they constantly decrease the conceptual
distance to the target thereafter by following content features. While this
strategy is sort of “playing it safe” and thus commonly preferred by most of
the players, it is observed that this is not the most efficient. The other
approach is to find the shortest paths between the articles while running the
risk of repeatedly getting lost. This technique is a precarious one but is
efficient, successful and thus particularly used by the top players.

This study identified aggregate strategies people use when navigating

information spaces and derived insights which could be used in the
development of automatically designing information spaces that humans
find intuitive to navigate and identify individual links that could make the
Wikipedia network easier to navigate.

Based on this study, we understand that although global information was

unavailable, humans tend to be good at finding short paths. This could be
because they possess vast amounts of background knowledge about the
world, which they leverage to make good guesses about possible solutions.
Does this mean that human-like high-level reasoning skills are really
necessary for finding short paths?

In an attempt to answer this question, [17] designed a number of navigation

agents that did not possess these skills, instead took decisions based solely
on numerical features.

The agents were constrained by several rules to make them behave the
same way humans would, thereby levelling the playing field. The agents
could only use local node features independent of global information about
the network. Only nodes visited so far, immediate neighbours, and the
target may play a role in picking the next node. The user can only follow
links from the current page or return to its immediate predecessor by
clicking the back button. Jumping between two unconnected pages was not
possible, even if they were both visited separately before.

The agent used the navigation algorithm given in Algorithm 6. Here, s is

the start node, t is the target node and V is the evaluation function. V is used
to score each neighbour $$u'$$ of the current node u and is a function of
u, $$u'$$ and t only. Thus, $$V(u'|u,t)$$ captures the likelihood of u’s
neighbour, $$u'$$ being closer to t than u is.
 ../images/462433_1_En_4_Chapter/462433_1_En_4_Figa_HTML.
gif

The following are the candidates for the evaluation V:

Degree-based navigation (DBN): $$V(u'|u,t) = out-degree(u')$$

Similarity-based navigation (SBN): $$V(u'|u,t) = tf-idf(u',t)$$

Expected value navigation (EVN):

$$V(u'|u,t) = 1 - (1 - q_{u't})^{out-degree(u')}$$

Supervised learning to learn $$V_{i}$$ for every iteration i

Reinforcement learning learns V i for every iteration i

The supervised and reinforcement learning were found to obtain the best
results. With the exception of DBN, even the fairly simple agents were
found to do well.

The study observed that agents find shorter paths than humans on average
and therefore, no sophisticated background knowledge or high-level
reasoning is required for navigating networks. However, humans are less
likely to get totally lost during search because they typically form robust
high-level plans with backup options, something automatic agents cannot
do. Instead, agents compensate for this lack of smartness with increased
thoroughness: since they cannot know what to expect, they always have to
inspect all options available, thereby missing out on fewer immediate
opportunities than humans, who focused on executing a premeditated plan,
may overlook shortcuts. In other words, humans have a common sense
expectation about what links may exist and strategize on the route to take
before even making the first move. Following through on this premeditated
plan, they might often just skim pages for links they already expect to exist,
thereby not taking notice of shortcuts hidden in the abundant textual article
contents. These deeper understanding of the world is the reason why their
searches fail completely less often: instead of exact, narrow plans, they
sketch out rough, high-level strategies with backup options that are robust
to contingencies.
4.10 Small World Models
We have observed that random graphs have a low clustering and a low
diameter, a regular graph has a high clustering and a high diameter. But, a
real-world graph has a clustering value comparable with that of a regular
graph but a diameter of the order of that of a random graph. This means
that neither the random graph models nor a regular graph generator is the
best model that can produce a graph with clustering and diameter
comparable with those of real-world graphs. In this section, we will look at
models that are capable of generating graphs that exhibit the small world
property.

4.10.1 Watts–Strogatz Model

In the Watts–Strogatz model, a generated graph has two kinds of edges,

local and long-range. Start with a set V of n points spaced uniformly on a
circle, and joins each point by an edge to each of its k nearest neighbours,
for a small constant k. These form the local edges which ensure the desired
high value of clustering. But this still has a higher than desired diameter. In
order to reduce the diameter, we introduce the long-range edges. First, add
and remove edges to create shortcuts between remote parts of the graph.
Next, for each edge with probability p, move the other end to a random
vertex. This gives the small world property for the graph which is
pictorially depicted in Fig. 4.18.

../images/462433_1_En_4_Chapter/462433_1_En_4_Fig18_HTML.
gif
Fig. 4.18

Depiction of a regular network proceeding first to a small world

network and next to a random network as the randomness, p
increases

This Watts–Strogatz model provides insight on the interplay between

clustering and small world. It helps capture the structure of many realistic
networks and accounts for the high clustering of real-world networks.
However, this model fails to provide the correct degree distribution.
The Watts–Stogatz model having $$O(|V|^{\frac{2}{3}})$$ is a non-
searchable graph.

4.10.2 Kleinberg Model

In this model, [8] begins with a set of nodes that are identified with a set of
lattice points in a $$n\times n$$ square,
$$\{(i,j): i\ \epsilon \ \{1,2,\ldots ,n\}, j\ \epsilon \ \{1,2,\ldots ,n\}\}$$
and the lattice distance between two nodes (i,j) and (k,l) is the number of
lattice steps between them $$d((i,j),(k,l)) = |k-i| + |l-j|$$. For a universal
constant $$p\ge 1$$, node u has a directed edge to every other node
within lattice distance p. These are node u’s local contacts. For universal
constants $$q\ge 0$$ and $$r\ge 0$$, we construct directed edges from
u to q other nodes using independent random trials; the $$i^{th}$$
directed edge from u has endpoint v with probability proportional to
$$[d(u,v)]^{-r}$$. These are node u’s long-range contacts. When r is
very small, the long range edges are too random to facilitate decentralized
search (as observed in Sect. 4.10.1), when r is too large, the long range
edges are not random enough to provide the jumps necessary to allow small
world phenomenon to be exhibited.

This model can be interpreted as follows: An individual lives in a grid and

knows her neighbours in all directions for a certain number of steps, and
the number of her acquaintances progressively decrease as we go further
away from her.

The model gives the bounds for a decentralized algorithm in Theorems 6, 7

and 8.

Theorem 6

There is a constant $$\alpha _{0}$$, depending on p and q but

independent of n, such that when $$r = 0$$, the expected delivery time of
any decentralized algorithm is atleast $$\alpha _{0}n^{\frac{2}{3}}$$

As n increases, decentralized algorithm performs best at q closer and closer

to 2 (Fig. 4.19). One way to look at why this value of 2 leads to best
performance is that at this value, the long range edges are being formed in a
way that is spread uniformly over all different scales of resolution. This
allows people fowarding the message to consistently find ways of reducing
their distance to the target, no matter the distance from it.

../images/462433_1_En_4_Chapter/462433_1_En_4_Fig19_HTML.
gif
Fig. 4.19

Log of decentralized search time as a function of the exponent

Theorem 7

There is a decentralized algorithm $$\mathcal {A}$$ and a constant

$$\alpha _{2}$$, independent of n, so that when $$r = 2$$ and
$$p = q = 1$$, the expected delivery time of $$\mathcal {A}$$ is
atmost $$\alpha _{2}(logn)^{2}$$.

When the long-range contacts are formed independent of the geometry of

the grid (as is the case in Sect. 4.10.1), short chains will exist but the nodes
will be unable to find them. When long-range contacts are formed by a
process related to the geometry of the grid in a specific way, however, then
the short chains will still form and the nodes operating with local
knowledge will be able to construct them.

Theorem 8

1. 1.

Let $$0 \le r < 2$$. There is a constant $$\alpha _{r}$$,

depending on p, q, r but independent of n, so that the expected
delivery time of the decentralized algorithm is atleast
$$\alpha _{r}n^{\frac{2-r}{3}}$$.

2. 2.
 Let $$r > 2$$. There is a constant $$\alpha _{r}$$, depending
on p, q, r but independent of n, so that the expected delivery time of
any decentralized algorithm is atleast
$$\alpha _{r}n^{\frac{r-2}{r-1}}$$.

Kleinberg’s model is a searchable graph because its diameter is

$$O((log|V|)^{2})$$.

4.10.2.1 Hierarchical Model

Consider a hierarchy using b-ary tree T for a constant b. Let V denote the
set of leaves of T and n denote the size of V. For two leaves v and w, h(v, w)
denotes the height of the least common ancestor of v and w in T and
$$f(\cdot )$$ determines the link probability. For each node $$v\in V$$
, a random link to w is created with probability proportional to f(h(v, w)),
i.e, the probability of choosing w is
$$f(h(v, w))/\sum \limits _{x\ne v}f(h(v, x))$$. k links out of each node v
is created in this way, choosing endpoint w each time independently and
with repetitions allowed. This results in a graph G on the set V. Here the
out-degree is $$k = clog^{2}n$$ for constant c. This process of
producing G is the hierarchical model with exponent $$\alpha $$ if f(h)
grows asymptotically like $$b^{-\alpha h}$$.
$$\begin{aligned} \lim _{h\rightarrow \infty } \frac{f(h)}{b^{-\alpha '
h}} = 0\ \forall \ \alpha ' < \alpha \ and\ \lim _{h\rightarrow \infty }
\frac{b^{-\alpha '' h}}{f(h)} = 0\ \forall \ \alpha '' > \alpha
\end{aligned}$$
A decentralized algorithm has knowledge of the tree T, and knows the
location of a target leaf that it must reach; however, it only learns the
structure of G as it visits nodes. The exponent $$\alpha $$ determines
how the structures of G and T are related.

Theorem 9

1. 1.
 There is a hierarchical model with exponent $$\alpha = 1$$ and
polylogarithmic out-degree in which decentralized algorithm can
achieve search time of O(logn).

2. 2.

For every $$\alpha \ne 1$$, there is no hierarchical model with

exponent $$\alpha $$ and polylogarithm out-degree in which a
decentralized algorithm can achieve polylogarithm search time.

4.10.2.2 Group-Induced Model

A group structure consists of an underlying set of nodes and a collection of

subsets of V. The collection of groups must include V itself, and must
satisfy the following two properties, for constants $$\lambda < 1$$
and $$\beta > 1$$.

1. 1.

If R is a group of size $$q \ge 2$$ containing a node v, then there is

a group $$R' \subseteq R$$ containing v that is strictly smaller than
R, but has size atleast $$\lambda q$$.

2. 2.

If $$R_{1}, R_{2}, \ldots $$ are groups that all have sizes atmost q
and all contain a common node v, then their union has size almost
$$\beta q$$.

Given a group structure (V,{ $$R_{i}$$}), and a monotone non-

increasing function $$f(\cdot )$$, we generate a graph on V in the
following manner. For two nodes v and w, q(v, w) denotes the minimum
size of the group containing both v and w. For each node
$$v\ \epsilon \ V$$, we create a random link to w with probability
proportional to f(q(v, w)). Repeating this k times independently yields k
links out of v. This is referred to as group-induced model with exponent
$$\alpha $$ if f(q) grows asymptotically like $$q^{-\alpha }$$.
$$\begin{aligned} \lim _{h\rightarrow \infty } \frac{f(q)}{q^{-\alpha }}
= 0\ \forall \ \alpha ' < \alpha \ and\ \lim _{h\rightarrow \infty }
\frac{q^{-\alpha ''}}{f(q)} = 0\ \forall \ \alpha '' > \alpha
\end{aligned}$$
A decentralized search algorithm in this network is given knowledge of the
full group structure, and must follow links of G to the designated target t.

Theorem 10

1. 1.

For every group structure, there is a group-induced model with

exponent $$\alpha = 1$$ and polylogarithm out-degree in which a
decentralized algorithm can achieve search time of O(logn).

2. 2.

For every $$\alpha < 1$$, there is no group-induced model with

exponent $$\alpha $$ and polylogarithm out-degree in which a
decentralized algorithm can achieve polylogarithm search time.

4.10.2.3 Hierarchical Models with a Constant Out-Degree

To start with a hierarchical model and construct graphs with constant out-
degree k, the value of k must be sufficiently large in terms of other
parameters of this model. To obviate the problem that t itself may have no
incoming links, the search problem is relaxed to finding a cluster of nodes
containing t. Given a complete b-ary tree T, where b is a constant, let L
denote the set of leaves of T and m denote the size of L. r nodes are placed
at each leaf of T, forming a set V of $$n = mr$$ nodes total. A graph G
on V is defined for a non-increasing function $$f(\cdot )$$, we create k
links out of each node $$v\in V$$, choosing w as an endpoint with
probability proportional to f(h(v, w)). Each set of r nodes at a common leaf
of T is referred to as a cluster and the resolution of the hierarchical model is
defined to be r.

A decentralized algorithm is given the knowledge of T, and a target node t.

It must reach any node in the cluster containing t.

Theorem 11

1. 1.

There is a hierarchical model with exponent $$\alpha = 1$$,

constant out-degree and polylogarithmic resolution in which a
decentralized algorithm can achieve polylogarithmic search time.

2. 2.

For every $$\alpha \ne 1$$, there is no hierarchical model with

exponent $$\alpha $$, constant out-degree and polylogarithmic
resolution in which a decentralized algorithm can achieve
polylogarithmic search time.

The proofs for Theorems 9, 10 and 11 can be found in [9].

4.10.3 Destination Sampling Model

Reference [14] describes an evolutionary model which by successively

updating shortcut edges of a small-world graph generates configurations
which exhibit the small world property.

The model defines V as a set of vertices in a regular lattice and E as the set
of long-range (shortcut) edges between vertices in V. This gives a digraph
G(V, E). Let $$G'$$ be G augmented with edges going both ways
between each pair of adjacent vertices in lattice.

The configurations are generated in the following manner: Let

$$G_{s} = (V, E_{s})$$ be a digraph of shortcuts at time s and
$$0< p < 1$$. Then $$G_{s+1}$$ is defined as:

1. 1.

Choose $$y_{s+1}$$ and $$z_{s+1}$$ uniformly from V.

2. 2.

If $$y_{s+1} \ne z_{s+1}$$ do a greedy walk in $$G_{s}'$$ from

$$y_{s}$$ to $$z_{s}$$. Let
$$x_{0} = y_{s+1}, x_{1}, \ldots , x_{t} = z_{s+1}$$ denote the
points of this walk.

3. 2.

For each $$x_{0}, x_{1}, \ldots , x_{t-1}$$ with atleast one

shortcut, independently with probability p replace a randomly chosen
shortcut with one to $$z_{s+1}$$.

Updating shortcuts using this algorithm eventually results in a shortcut

graph with greedy path-lengths of $$O(log^{2}n)$$. p serves to
dissociate shortcut from a vertex with its neighbours. For this purpose, the
lower the value of $$p > 0$$ the better, but very small values of p will
lead to slower sampling.

Each application of this algorithm defines a transition of Markov chain on a

set of shortcut configurations. Thus for any n, the Markov chain is defined
on a finite state space. Since this chain is irreducible and aperiodic, the
chain converges to a unique stationary distribution.
Problems
Download the General Relativity and Quantum Cosmology collaboration
network available at https://snap.stanford.edu/data/ca-GrQc.txt.gz.

For the graph corresponding to this dataset (which will be referred to as

real world graph), generate a small world graph and compute the following
network parameters:

33

Degree distribution

34

Short path length distribution

35

Clustering coefficient distribution

36

WCC size distribution

37

For each of these distributions, state whether or not the small world model
has the same property as the real world graph

38

Is the small world graph generator capable of generating graphs that are
representative of real world graphs?
References

1. 1.
Adamic, Lada, and Eytan Adar. 2005. How to search a social network.
Social Networks 27 (3): 187–203.
2. 2.
Adamic, Lada A., Rajan M. Lukose, Amit R. Puniyani, and
Bernardo A. Huberman. 2001. Search in power-law networks.
Physical Review E 64 (4): 046135.
3. 3.
Beck, M., and P. Cadamagnani. 1968. The extent of intra-and inter-
social group contact in the American society. Unpublished manuscript,
Stanley Milgram Papers, Manuscripts and Archives, Yale University.
4. 4.
Dodds, Peter Sheridan, Roby Muhamad, and Duncan J. Watts. 2003.
An experimental study of search in global social networks. Science
301 (5634): 827–829.
5. 5.
Horvitz, Eric, and Jure Leskovec. 2007. Planetary-scale views on an
instant-messaging network. Redmond-USA: Microsoft research
Technical report.
6. 6.
Killworth, Peter D., and H. Russell Bernard. 1978. The reversal small-
world experiment. Social Networks 1 (2): 159–192.
7. 7.
Killworth, Peter D., Christopher McCarty, H. Russell Bernard, and
Mark House. 2006. The accuracy of small world chains in social
networks. Social Networks 28 (1): 85–96.
8. 8.
Kleinberg, Jon. 2000. The small-world phenomenon: An algorithmic
perspective. In Proceedings of the thirty-second annual ACM
symposium on theory of computing, 163–170. ACM.
9. 9.
Kleinberg, Jon M. 2002. Small-world phenomena and the dynamics of
information. In Advances in neural information processing systems,
431–438.
10. 10.
 Kleinfeld, Judith. 2002. Could it be a big world after all? the six
degrees of separation myth. Society 12:5–2.
11. 11.
Korte, Charles, and Stanley Milgram. 1970. Acquaintance networks
between racial groups: Application of the small world method.
Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 15 (2): 101.
12. 12.
Liben-Nowell, David, Jasmine Novak, Ravi Kumar, Prabhakar
Raghavan, and Andrew Tomkins. 2005. Geographic routing in social
networks. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the
United States of America 102 (33): 11623–11628.
13. 13.
Lin, Nan, Paul Dayton, and Peter Greenwald. 1977. The urban
communication network and social stratification: A small world
experiment. Annals of the International Communication Association 1
(1): 107–119.
14. 14.
Sandberg, Oskar, and Ian Clarke. 2006. The evolution of navigable
small-world networks. arXiv:cs/0607025.
15. 15.
Travers, Jeffrey, and Stanley Milgram. 1967. The small world
problem. Phychology Today 1 (1): 61–67.
16. 16.
Travers, Jeffrey, and Stanley Milgram. 1977. An experimental study of
the small world problem. Social Networks, 179–197. Elsevier.
17. 17.
West, Robert, and Jure Leskovec. 2012. Automatic versus human
navigation in information networks. ICWSM.
18. 18.
West, Robert, and Jure Leskovec. 2012. Human wayfinding in
information networks. In Proceedings of the 21st international
conference on World Wide Web, 619–628. ACM.
© Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2018
Krishna Raj P.M., Ankith Mohan and K.G. Srinivasa, Practical Social Network Analysis with Python,
Computer Communications and Networks
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-96746-2_5

5. Graph Structure of Facebook

Krishna Raj P. M.1 , Ankith Mohan1 and K. G. Srinivasa2

(1) Department of ISE, Ramaiah Institute of Technology, Bangalore,

Karnataka, India
(2) Department of Information Technology, C.B.P. Government
Engineering College, Jaffarpur, Delhi, India

Krishna Raj P. M.
Email: krishnarajpm@gmail.com

Reference [2] explains the study of the social graph of the active users of
the world’s largest online social network, Facebook . The study mainly
focused on computing the number of users and their friendships, degree
distribution, path length, clustering and various mixing patterns. All
calculations concerning this study were performed on Hadoop cluster with
2250 machines using Hadoop/Hive data analysis framework developed at
Facebook. This social network is seen to display a broad range of unifying
structural properties such as homophily, clustering, small-world effect,
heterogeneous distribution of friends and community structure.
The graph of the entire social network of the active members of
Facebook as of May 2011 is analysed in an anonymized form and the focus
is placed on the set of active user accounts reliably corresponding to people.
A user of Facebook is deemed as an active member if they logged into the
site in the last 28 days from the time of measurement in May 2011 and had
atleast one Facebook friend. The restriction to study only active users
allows us to eliminate accounts that have been abandoned in the early
stages of creation, and focus on accounts that plausibly represent actual
individuals. This graphs precedes the existence of “subscriptions” and does
not include “pages” that people may “like” . According to this definition,
the population of active Facebook users is 721 million at the time of
measurement. The world’s population at the time was 6.9 billion people
which means that this graph includes roughly of the Earth’s
inhabitants. There were 68.7 billion friendships in this graph, so the average
Facebook user had around 190 Facebook friends.
The study also focuses on the subgraph of the 149 US Facebook users.
The US Census Bureau for 2011 shows roughly 260 million individuals in
the US over the age of 13 and therefore eligible to create a Facebook
account. Therefore this social network includes more than half the eligible
US population. This graph had 15.9 billion edges, so an average US user
had 214 other US users as friends. Note that this average is higher than that
of the global graph.
Neighbourhood function , denoted by of a graph G returns for
each , the number of pairs of vertices (x,y) such that x has a path of
length at most x to y. It provides data about how fast the “average ball”
around each vertex expands. It measures what percentile of vertex pairs are
within a given distance. Although, the diameter of a graph can be wildly
distorted by the presence of a single ill- connected path in some peripheral
region of the graph, the neighbourhood function and the average path length
are thought to robustly capture the distances between pairs of vertices.
From this function, it is possible to derive the distance distribution which
gives for each t, the fraction of reachable pairs at a distance of exactly t.

5.1 HyperANF Algorithm

The HyperANF algorithm [1] is a new tool for accurately studying the
distance distribution of large graphs. It is a diffusion-based algorithm that is
able to approximate quickly the neighbourhood functions of very large
graphs. It is based on the observation that B(x, r), the ball of radius r around
the vertex x satisfies
Since , we can compute each B(x, r) incrementally using
sequential scans of graph, i.e, scans in which we go in turn through the
successor list of each vertex. The problem is that during the scan we need to
access randomly the sets $$B(x,r-1)$$ (the sets B(x, r) can be just saved
on disk on a update file and reloaded later). The space needed for such sets
would be too large to be kept in main memory. However, HyperANF
represents these sets in an approximate way, using HyperLogLog counters,
which are a kind of dictionaries that can answer questions related to size.
Each such counter is made of a number of small registers . A register keeps
track of the maximum number of trailing zeros of the values of a good hash
function applied to the elements of a sequence of vertices: the number of
distinct elements in the sequence is proportional to $$2^{M}$$. A
technique called stochastic averaging is used to divide the stream into a
number of substreams, each analysed by a different register. The result is
then computed by aggregating suitably the estimation from each register.
The main performance challenge to solve is, how to quickly compute
the HyperLogLog counter associated to a union of balls, each represented
by a HyperLogLog counter: HyperANF uses an algorithm based on word-
level parallelism that makes the computation very fast, and a carefully
engineered implementation exploits multicore architectures with a linear
speedup in the number of cores. Another important feature of HyperANF is
that it uses a systolic approach to avoid recomputing balls that do not
change during an iteration. This approach is fundamental to be able to
compute the entire distance distribution.
The results of a run of HyperANF at the $$t^{th}$$ iteration is
the estimation of the neighbourhood function in t.
$$\begin{aligned} \hat{N_{G}(t)} = \sum \limits _{0\le i < |V|}X_{i,t}
\end{aligned}$$
where $$X_{i,t}$$ denotes the HyperLogLog counter that counts the
vertices reached by vertex i in t steps.

5.2 Iterative Fringe Upper Bound (iFUB)

Algorithm
HyperANF cannot provide exact results about the diameter. However, the
number of steps of a run is necessarily a lower bound for the diameter. To
compute the exact diameter, a highly parallel version of this iFUB
algorithm [1] was implemented.
The idea behind this algorithm is as follows: consider some vertex x,
and find by breadth-first search a vertex y farthest from x. Now, find a
vertex z farthest from y by which d(y, z) gives us a very good lower bound
on the diameter. Then, consider a vertex c halfway between y and z. This
vertex c is in the middle of the graph, so if h is the eccentricity of c, 2h is
expected to be a good upper bound for the diameter. If lower and upper
bounds match, we are done. Otherwise, we consider the fringe: the vertices
at distance exactly h from c. If M is the maximum of eccentricities of the
vertices in fringe, $$max\{2(h-1),M\}$$ is a new upper bound, and M
is a new lower bound. We then iterate the process by examining fringes
closer to the root until the bounds match. The implementation uses a
multicore breadth first search: the queue of vertices at distance d is
segmented into small blocks handled by each core. At the end of a round,
we have computed the queue of vertices at distance $$d+1$$.

5.3 Spid
Measures the dispersion of degree distribution. Spid, an acronym for
“shortest-paths index of dispersion”, is defined as the variance-to-mean
ratio of the distance distribution. It is sometimes referred to as the
webbiness of a social network. Networks with spid greater than one should
be considered web-like whereas networks with spid less than one should be
considered properly social.
The intuition behind this measure is that proper social networks strongly
favour short connections, whereas in the web, long connections are not
uncommon. The correlation between spid and average distance is inverse,
i.e, larger the average distance, smaller is the spid.
The spid of the Facebook graph is 0.09 thereby confirming that it is a
proper social network.

5.4 Degree Distribution

The degree distribution was computed by performing several HyperANF
runs on the graph, obtaining estimate of the values of the neighbourhood
function with relative standard deviation at most $$58\%$$. These
neighbourhood functions were computed on a single 24-core machine with
72 GiB of RAM and 1 TiB of disk space, using the HyperANF algorithm,
averaging across 10 runs.
Figure 5.1 shows the degree distribution of the global and the US
Facebook graph. We observe that it is monotonically decreasing, except for
a small anomaly near 20 friends. This kink is due to forces within the
Facebook product to encourage the low friend count individuals in
particular to gain more friends until they reach 20 friends. The distribution
shows a clear cut-off at 5000 friends, a limit imposed on the number of
friends by Facebook at the time of measurement. Since 5000 is nowhere
near the number of Facebook users, each user is clearly friends with a
vanishing fraction of the Facebook population, making these social
relationships sparse.

../images/462433_1_En_5_Chapter/462433_1_En_5_Fig1_HTML.gif
Fig. 5.1 Degree distribution of the global and US Facebook active users, alongside its CCDF

From Fig. 5.1, we observe that most individuals have a moderate

number of friends, less than 200, while a much smaller population have
many hundreds or even thousands of friends. There is a small population of
users who have an abnormally high degree than the average user. The
distribution is clearly right-skewed with high variance but there is a
substantial curvature exhibited in the distribution on the log–log scale. This
curvature is somewhat surprising because empirical measurements of
networks have claimed that the degree distributions follow a power law.
Thus, strict power laws are inappropriate for this degree distribution.

5.5 Path Length

The goal in studying the distance distribution is the identification of
interesting statistical parameters that can be used to tell proper social
networks from other complex networks such as web graphs. Distance
distribution is one such interesting global feature that makes it possible to
reject probabilistic models even when they match local features such as in-
degree distribution.
The Facebook graph does not have paths between all pairs of vertices. It
consists of one large connected component and therefore the neighbourhood
function is representative of an overwhelming majority of pair of vertices.
Figure 5.2 shows the neighbourhood function computed on the graph. The
average distance between users was 4.7 for global users and 4.3 for US
users, thus confirming the six degrees of separation. What is more
interesting, is that since the results show 3.74 intermediaries, this gives a
“four degrees of separation”. $$92\%$$ of all pairs of FB users were
within 5 degrees of separation, $$99.6\%$$ were within 6 degrees.
For US, $$96\%$$ were within 5 degrees and $$99.7\%$$ were
within 6 degrees.

../images/462433_1_En_5_Chapter/462433_1_En_5_Fig2_HTML.gif
Fig. 5.2 Neighbourhood function showing the percentage of users that are within h hops of one
another

5.6 Component Size

Figure 5.3 shows the distribution of component sizes on log–log scale.
While there are many connected components, most of these components are
extremely small. The second largest component has just over 2000
individuals, whereas the largest component consists of $$99.91\%$$ of
the network. This giant component comprises the vast majority of active
Facebook users with atleast one friend. So not only are the average path
lengths between individuals short, these social connections exist between
nearly everyone on Facebook.

../images/462433_1_En_5_Chapter/462433_1_En_5_Fig3_HTML.gif
Fig. 5.3 Distribution of component sizes on log–log scale

This component structure was analysed using the Newman–Zipf (NZ)

algorithm. The NZ algorithm is a type of Union-Find algorithm with path
compression which records the component structure dynamically as edges
are added to the network that begins completely empty of edges. When all
the edges are added, the algorithm has computed the component structure of
the network. This algorithm does not require that the edges must be retained
in memory. The algorithm is applied to the Facebook graph on a single
computer with 64GB of RAM by streaming over a list of edges.

5.7 Clustering Coefficient and Degeneracy

Neighbourhood graph for user i, also called the ego or 1-ball graph is the
graph-induced subgraph consisting of users who are friends with user i and
friendship between these users. However, user i is not included in their own
neighbourhoods.
Figure 5.4 shows the clustering coefficient and the degeneracy on log–
log scale. The clustering coefficient decreases monotonically with degree.
In particular, the clustering coefficient drops rapidly for users with close to
5000 friends, indicating that these users are likely using Facebook for less
coherent social purposes and befriending users more indiscriminately.
Having observed such large clustering coefficients, the degeneracy of
the graph was measured to study the sparsity of neighbourhood graphs.
Formally, the degeneracy of an undirected graph is the largest k for which
the graph has a non-empty k-core. The k-core of a graph is the maximal
subgraph in which all the vertices have degree atleast k, i.e, the subgraph
formed by iteratively removing all the vertices of degree less than k until
convergence. Figure 5.4 depicts the average degeneracy as an increasing
function of user degree. From this, we find that even though the graph is
sparse as a whole, when users accumulate sizeable friend counts, their
friendships are far more indiscriminate and instead center around sizeable
dense cores.

../images/462433_1_En_5_Chapter/462433_1_En_5_Fig4_HTML.gif
Fig. 5.4 Clustering coefficient and degeneracy as a function of degree on log–log scale

../images/462433_1_En_5_Chapter/462433_1_En_5_Fig5_HTML.gif
Fig. 5.5 Average number of unique and non-unique friends-of-friends as a function of degree

5.8 Friends-of-Friends
The friends-of-friends, as the name suggests, denotes the number of users
that are within two hops of an initial user. Figure 5.5 computes the average
counts of both the unique and non-unique friends-of-friends as a function of
the degree. The non-unique friends-of-friends count corresponds to the
number of length 2 paths starting at an initial vertex and not returning to
that vertex. The unique friends-of-friends count corresponds to the number
of unique vertices that can be reached at the end of a length 2 path.
A naive approach to counting friends-of-friends would assume that a
user with k friends has roughly $$k^{2}$$ non-unique friends-of-
friends, assuming that their friends have roughly the same friend count as
them. The same principle could also apply to estimating the number of
unique friends-of-friends. However, the number of unique friends-of-
friends grows very close to linear, and the number of non-unique friends-of-
friends grows only moderately faster than linear. While the growth rate may
be slower than expected, as Fig. 5.5 illustrates, until a user has more than
800 friends the absolute amounts are unexpectedly large: a user with 100
friends has 27500 unique friends-of-friends and 40300 non-unique friends-
of-friends. This is significantly more than $$100\times 99 = 9900$$
non-unique friends-of-friends we would have expected if our friends had
roughly the same number of friends as us.

5.9 Degree Assortativity

The number of friendships in your local network neighbourhood depends
on the number of friends of your friends. It is observed that your
neighbour’s degree is correlated with your own degree: it tends to be large
when your degree is large, and small when your degree is small. This is
called degree assortativity . Figure 5.6 depicts the degree assortativity and
this explains the more than expected friends behaviour of the previous
section.

../images/462433_1_En_5_Chapter/462433_1_En_5_Fig6_HTML.gif
Fig. 5.6 Average neighbour degree as a function of an individual’s degree, and the conditional
probability $$p(k'|k)$$ that a randomly chosen neighbour of an individual with degree k has
degree $$k'$$
5.10 Login Correlation
Figure 5.7 shows the correlation calculation of the number of days users
logged in during the 28-day window of the study. The definition of a
random neighbour of vertices with trait x is to first select a vertex with trait
x in proportion to their degree and select an edge connected to that vertex
uniformly at random, i.e, we give each edge connected to vertices with trait
x equal weight. From Fig. 5.7, it is evident that similar to degree’s
assortativity property, login also shows a correlation between that of an
individual with neighbours’.

../images/462433_1_En_5_Chapter/462433_1_En_5_Fig7_HTML.gif
Fig. 5.7 Neighbor’s logins versus user’s logins to Facebook over a period of 28 days, and a user’s
degree versus the number of days a user logged into Facebook in the 28 day period

This correlation phenomena is best explained as follows: a Facebook

user provides and receives content through status updates, links, videos,
photos, etc to and from friends, and hence may be motivated to login if they
have more friends. So, a user who logs in more generally has more friends
on Facebook and vice versa. So, since your friends have more friends than
you do, they also login to Facebook more than you do.

5.11 Other Mixing Patterns

The study later focused on the effects of age, gender and country of origin
on friendships.

5.11.1 Age
To understand the friendship patterns among individuals with different ages,
we compute of selecting a random neighbour of individuals with age
t who has age $$t'$$. A random neighbour means that each edge
connected to a user with age t is given equal probability of being followed.
Figure 5.8 shows that the resulting distribution is not merely a function of
the magnitude of age difference $$|t-t'|$$ as might naively be expected,
and instead are asymmetric about a maximum value of $$t'=t$$.
Unsurprisingly, a random neighbour is most likely to be the same age as
you. Younger individuals have most of their friends within a small age
range while older individuals have a much wider range.

../images/462433_1_En_5_Chapter/462433_1_En_5_Fig8_HTML.gif
Fig. 5.8 Distribution $$p(t'|t)$$ of ages $$t'$$ for the neighbours of users with age t

5.11.2 Gender
By computing $$p(g'|g)$$, we get the probability that a random
neighbour of individuals with gender g has gender $$g'$$ where M
denotes male and F denotes female. The Facebook graph gives us the
following probabilities, $$p(F|M) = 0.5131$$, $$p(M|M) = 0.4869$$,
$$p(F|F) = 0.5178$$ and $$p(M|F) = 0.4822$$. By these computations,
a random neighbour is more likely to be a female. There are roughly 30
million fewer active female users on Facebook with average female degree
(198) larger than the average male degree (172) with $$p(F) = 0.5156$$
and $$p(M) = 0.4844$$. Therefore, we have
$$p(F|M)< p(F) < p(F|F)$$ and $$p(M|F)< p(M) < p(M|M)$$
. However, the difference between these probabilities is extremely small
thereby giving a minimal effect on the preference for same gender
friendships on Facebook.

5.11.3 Country of Origin

The obvious expectation is that an individual will have more friends from
the same country of origin than from outside that country, and data shows
that $$84.2\%$$ of edges are within countries. So, the network divides
fairly cleanly along country lines into network clusters or communities.
This division can be quantified using modularity , denoted by Q, which is
the fraction of edges within communities in a randomized version of the
network that preserves the degree for each individual, but is otherwise
random. The computed value of $$Q = 0.7486$$ which is quite large and
indicates a strongly modular network structure at the scale of countries.
Figure 5.9 visualizes this structure displayed as a heatmap of the number of
edges between 54 countries where active Facebook user population exceeds
a million users and is more than $$50\%$$ of internet-enabled
population. The results show a intuitive grouping according to geography.
However, other groupings not based on geography include combination of
UK, Ghana and South Africa which reflect links based on strong historical
ties.

../images/462433_1_En_5_Chapter/462433_1_En_5_Fig9_HTML.gif
Fig. 5.9 Normalized country adjacency matrix as a heatmap on a log scale. Normalized by dividing
each element of the adjacency matrix by the product of the row country degree and column country
degree

Table 5.1 Countries with their codes

Country Code
Indonesia ID
Philipines PH
Sri Lanka LK
Australia AU
New Zealand NZ
Thailand TH
Malaysia MY
Singapore SG
Hong Kong HK
Taiwan TW
United States US
Dominican Republic DO
Puerto Rico PR
Mexico MX
Canada CA
Venezuela VE
Chile CL
Argentina AR
Uruguay UY
Colombia CO
Costa Rica CR
Guatemala GT
Ecuador EC
Peru PE
Country Code
Bolivia BO
Spain ES
Ghana GH
United Kingdom GB
South Africa ZA
Israel IL
Jordan JO
United Arab Emirates AE
Kuwait KW
Algeria DZ
Tunisia TN
Italy IT
Macedonia MK
Albania AL
Serbia RS
Slovenia SI
Bosnia and Herzegovina BA
Croatia HR
Turkey TR
Portugal PT
Belgium BE
France FR
Hungary HU
Ireland IE
Denmark DK
Norway NO
Sweden SE
Czech Republic CZ
Bulgaria BG
Greece GR

The complete list of countries is provided in Table 5.1.

Appendix

Problems
Download the Friendster undirected social network data available at https://
snap.stanford.edu/data/com-Friendster.html.
This network consists of 65 million nodes and 180 million edges. The
world’s population in 2012 was 7 billion people. This means that the
network has $$1\%$$ of the world’s inhabitants.
For this graph, compute the following network parameters:

39 Degree distribution

40 Path length distribution

41 WCC size distribution

42 Clustering coefficient distribution

43 k-core node size distribution

44 Average friends-of-friends distribution

45 Average neighbour degree distribution

References
1. Backstrom, Lars, Paolo Boldi, Marco Rosa, Johan Ugander, and Sebastiano Vigna. 2012. Four
degrees of separation. In Proceedings of the 4th Annual ACM Web Science Conference, 33–42.
ACM.

2. Ugander, Johan, Brian Karrer, Lars Backstrom, and Cameron Marlow. 2011. The anatomy of the
facebook social graph. arXiv:1111.4503.
© Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2018
Krishna Raj P.M., Ankith Mohan and K.G. SrinivasaPractical Social
Network Analysis with PythonComputer Communications and
Networkshttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-96746-2_6

6. Peer-To-Peer Networks
Krishna Raj P. M.1 , Ankith Mohan1 and K. G. Srinivasa2
(1)
Department of ISE, Ramaiah Institute of Technology, Bangalore,
Karnataka, India
(2)
Department of Information Technology, C.B.P. Government Engineering
College, Jaffarpur, Delhi, India

Krishna Raj P. M.
Email: krishnarajpm@gmail.com

Peer-To-Peer (P2P) overlay networks are distributed systems in nature,

without any hierarchical organization or centralized control. Peers form
self-organizing networks that are overlayed on the Internet Protocol (IP)
networks, offering a mix of various features such as robust wide-area
routing architecture, efficient search of data items, selection of nearby
peers, redundant storage, permanence, hierarchical naming, trust and
authentication, anonymity, massive scalability and fault tolerance. These
systems go beyond services offered by client-server systems by having
symmetry in roles where a client may also be a server. It allows access to
its resources by other systems and supports resource-sharing, which
requires fault-tolerance, self-organization and massive scalability
properties. Unlike Grid systems, P2P networks do not arise from the
collaboration between established and connected groups of systems and
without a more reliable set of resources to share. All being said, the core
operation in a P2P network is the efficient location of data items.
These networks are deliberately designed in a decentralized manner, such
that global search is impossible.

Figure 6.1 shows an abstract P2P overlay architecture, illustrating the

components in the communications framework. The communication
framework specifies a fully-distributed, cooperative network design with
peers building a self-organizing system.

../images/462433_1_En_6_Chapter/462433_1_En_6_Fig1_HTML.
gif
Fig. 6.1

Abstract P2P network architecture

There are two classes of P2P infrastructure: Structured and Unstructured.

Structured P2P networks are tightly controlled and content are placed not at
random peers but at specified locations that will make subsequent queries
more efficient. Content Addressable Network (CAN), Tapestry, Chord,
Pastry, Kademlia and Viceroy are some of the commonly known Structured
networks. Unstructured P2P networks organize peers in a random graph in
flat or hierarchical manners and use flooding or random walks or
expanding-ring Time-To-Live (TTL) search, etc on the graph to query
content stored by overlay peers. Each peer visited will evaluate the query
locally on its own content, and will support complex queries. Freenet,
Gnutella, Fastrack/KaZaA , BitTorrent and Overnet/eDonkey2000 are
instances of Unstructured networks.

Reference [2] gives a detailed comparison of these P2P networks. In this

chapter we will take a close look at the Chord and the Freenet P2P
networks.

6.1 Chord
Chord [3] is a distributed lookup protocol that addresses the problem of
efficiently locating the node that stores a particular data item in a structured
P2P application. Given a key, it maps the key onto a node. A key is
associated with each data item and key/data item pair is stored at the node
to which the key maps. Chord is designed to adapt efficiently as nodes join
and leave the network dynamically.

The Chord software takes the form of a library to be linked with the client
and server applications that use it. The application interacts with Chord in
two ways: First, Chord provides key algorithm that yields IP address of the
node responsible for the key. Next, the Chord software on each node
notifies the application of changes in the set of keys that the node is
responsible for. This allows the application to move the corresponding
values to new homes when new node joins.

Chord uses consistent hashing . In this algorithm, each node and key has a
m-bit identifier. One has to ensure that m is large enough to make the
probability of two nodes or keys hashing to the same identifier negligible.
The keys are assigned to nodes as follows: The identifiers are ordered in an
identifier circle modulo $$2^{m}$$. Key k is assigned to the first node
whose identifier is equal to or follows k. This node is called the successor
node of key k, denoted by successor(k). If the identifiers are represented as
a circle of numbers from 0 to $$2^{m-1}$$, then successor(k) is the first
node clockwise from k. This tends to balance the load, since each node
receives roughly the same number of keys and involves relatively little
movement of keys when nodes join and leave the system. In a N-node
system, each node maintains information of O(logN) other nodes and
resolves all lookups via O(logN) messages to the other nodes. To maintain
consistent hashing mapping when a node n joins the network, certain keys
previously assigned to n’s successor now become assigned to n. When n
leaves the network, all of its assigned keys are reassigned to n’s successor.

Each node n, maintains a routing table with atmost m entries, called the
finger table . The ith entry in a table at node n contains entry of the first
node s, that succeeds n by atleast $$2^{i-1}$$ on the identifier circle, i.e,
$$s = successor(n + 2^{i-1})$$ where $$1 \le i \le m$$ (and all
arithmetic is modulo $$2^{m}$$). Node s is the i 4th finger of node n.
This finger table scheme is designed for two purposes: First, each node
stores information about only a small number of other nodes and knows
more about nodes closely following it than the nodes far away. Next, the
node’s finger table generally does not contain enough information to
determine the success of an arbitrary key k.

If n does not know the successor of key k, then it finds the node whose ID
is closer than its own to k. That node will know more about identifier circle
in region of k than n does. Thus, n searches its finger table for node j whose
ID immediately precedes k, and asks j for the node it knows whose ID is
closest to k. By repeating this process, n learns about nodes with IDs closer
to k.

In a dynamic network where the nodes can join and leave at any time, to
preserve the ability to locate every key in the network, each node’s
successor must be correctly maintained. For fast lookups, the finger tables
must be correct. To simplify this joining and leaving mechanisms, each
node maintains a predecessor pointer . A node’s predecessor pointer
contains Chord identifier and IP address of the immediate predecessor of
this node, and can be used to walk counter-clockwise around the identifier
circle. To preserve this, Chord performs the following tasks when a node n
joins the network: First, it initializes the predecessor and fingers of the
node n. Next, it updates the fingers and predecessors of the existing nodes
to reflect the addition of n. Finally, it notifies the application software so
that it can transfer state associated keys that node n is now responsible for.

6.2 Freenet
Freenet [1] is an unstructured P2P network application that allows the
publication, replication and retrieval of data while protecting the anonymity
of both the authors and the readers. It operates as a network of identical
nodes that collectively pool their storage space to store data files and
cooperate to route requests to the most likely physical location of data. The
files are referred to in a location-independent manner, and are dynamically
replicated in locations near requestors and deleted from locations where
there is no interest. It is infeasible to discover the true origin or destination
of a file passing through the network, and difficult for a node operator to be
held responsible for the actual physical contents of his or her node.
The adaptive peer-to-peer network of nodes query one another to store and
retrieve data files, which are named by location-independent keys. Each
node maintains a datastore which it makes available to the network for
reading and writing, as well as a dynamic routing table containing
addresses of their immediate neighbour nodes and the keys they are thought
to hold. Most users run nodes, both for security from hostile foreign nodes
and to contribute to the network’s storage capacity. Thus, the system is a
cooperative distributed file system with location independence and
transparent lazy replication.

The basic model is that the request for keys are passed along from node to
node through a chain of proxy requests in which each node makes a local
decision about where to send the request next, in the style of IP routing.
Since the nodes only have knowledge of their immediate neighbours, the
routing algorithms are designed to adaptively adjust routes over time to
provide efficient performance while using only local knowledge. Each
request is identified by a pseudo-unique random number, so that nodes can
reject requests they have seen before, and a hops-to-live limit which is
decremented at each node, to prevent infinite chains. If a request is rejected
by a node, then the immediately preceding node chooses a different node to
forward to. The process continues until the request is either satisfied or
exceeds its hops-to-live. The result backtracks the chain to the sending
node.

No privileges among the nodes, thereby preventing hierarchy or a central

point of failure. Joining the network is simply a matter of first discovering
the address of one or more existing nodes and then starting to send
messages.

To retrieve a file, a user must first obtain or calculate its key (calculation of
the key is explained in [1]). Then, a request message is sent to his or her
own node specifying that key and a hops-to-live value. When a node
receives a request, it first checks its own store for the file and returns it if
found, together with a note saying it was the source of the data. If not
found, it looks up the nearest key in its routing table to the key requested
and forwards the request to the corresponding node. If that request is
ultimately successful and returns with the data, the node will pass the data
back to the user, cache the file in its own datastore, and create a new entry
in its routing table associating the actual data source with the requested key.
A subsequent request for the same key will be immediately satisfied by the
user’s node. To obviate the security issue which could potentially be caused
by maintaining a table of data sources, any node can unilaterally decide to
change the reply message to claim itself or another arbitrarily chosen node
as the data source.

If a node cannot forward a request to its preferred node, the node having
the second-nearest key will be tried, then the third-nearest, and so on. If a
node runs out of candidates to try, it reports failure back to its predecessor
node, which will then try its second choice, etc. In this manner, a request
operates as a steepest-ascent hill-climbing search with backtracking. If the
hops-to-live limit is exceeded, a failure result is propagated back to the
original requestor without any further nodes being tried. As nodes process
requests, they create new routing table entries for previously unknown
nodes that supplies files, thereby increasing connectivity.

File insertions work in the same manner as file requests. To insert a file, a
user first calculates a file key and then sends an insert message to his or her
node specifying the proposed key and a hops-to-live value (this will
determine the number of nodes to store it on). When a node receives an
insert message, it first checks its own store to see if the key is already
taken. If the key exists, the node returns the existing file as if a request has
been made for it. This notifies the user of a collision. If the key is not
found, the node looks up the nearest key in its routing table to the key
proposed and forward the insert to the corresponding node. If that insert
also causes a collision and returns with the data, the node will pass the data
back to the upstream inserter and again behave as if a request has been
made. If the hops-to-live limit is reached without a key collision being
detected, a success message will be propagated back to the original inserter.
The user then sends the data to insert, which will be propagated along the
path established by the initial query and stored in each node along the way.
Each node will also create an entry in its routing table associating the
inserter with the new key. To avoid the obvious security problem, any node
along the way can arbitrarily decide to change the insert message to claim
itself or another arbitrarily-chosen node as the data source. If a node cannot
forward an insert to its preferred node, it uses the same backtracking
approach as was used while handling requests.

Data storage is managed as a least recently used cache (LRU) approach by

each node, in which data items are kept stored in decreasing order by the
time of most recent request, or time of insert, if an item has never been
requested. When a new file arrives, which would cause the datastore to
exceed the designated size, the least recently used files are evicted in order
until there is space. Once a particular file is dropped from all the nodes, it
will no longer be available in the network. Files are encrypted to the extent
that node operators cannot access its contents.

When a new node intends to join the network, it chooses a random seed and
sends an announcement message containing its address and the hash of that
seed to some existing node. When a node receives a new node
announcement, it generates a random seed, XORs that with the hash it
received and hashes the result again to create a commitment. It then
forwards this new hash to some randomly chosen node. This forwarding
continues until the hops-to-live of the announcement runs out. The last
node to receive the announcement just generates a seed. Now all the nodes
in the chain reveal their seeds and the key of the new node is assigned as
the XOR of all the seeds. Checking the commitments enables each node to
confirm that everyone revealed their seeds truthfully. This yields a
consistent random key which each node as an entry for this new node in the
routing table.

A key factor in the identification of a small-world network is the existence

of a scale-free power-law distribution of the links within the network, as the
tail of such distributions provides the highly connected nodes needed to
create short paths. Figure 6.2 shows the degree distribution of the Freenet
network. Except for one point, it seems to follow a power-law. Therefore,
Freenet seems to exhibit power-law.

../images/462433_1_En_6_Chapter/462433_1_En_6_Fig2_HTML.
gif
Fig. 6.2

Degree distribution of the freenet network

Reference [4] observed that the LRU cache replacement had a steep
reduction in the hit ratio with increasing load. Based on intuition from the
small-world models they proposed an enhanced-clustering cache
replacement scheme for use in place of LRU. This replacement scheme
forced the routing tables to resemble neighbour relationships in a small-
world acquaintance graph and improved the request hit ratio dramatically
while keeping the small average hops per successful request comparable to
LRU.

Problems
In this exercise, the task is to evaluate a decentralized search algorithm on a
network where the edges are created according to a hierarchical tree
structure. The leaves of the tree will form the nodes of the network and the
edge probabilities between two nodes depends on their proximity in the
underlying tree structure.

P2P networks can be organized in a tree hierarchy, where the root is the
main software application and the second level contains the different
countries. The third level represents the different states and the fourth level
is the different cities. There could be several more levels depending on the
size and structure of the P2P network. Nevertheless, the final level are the
clients.

Consider a situation where client A wants a file that is located in client B. If

A cannot access B directly, A may connect to a node C which is, for
instance, in the same city and ask C to access the file instead. If A does not
have access to any node in the same city as B, it may try to access a node in
the same state. In general, A will attempt to connect to the node “closest” to
B.

In this problem, there are two networks: one is the observed network, i.e,
the edge between P2P clients and the other is the hierarchical tree structure
that is used to generated the edges in the observed network.

For this exercise, we will use a complete, perfectly balanced b-ary tree T
(each node has b children and $$b\ge 2$$), and a network whose nodes
are the leaves of T. For any pair of network nodes v and w, h(v, w) denotes
the distance between the nodes and is defined as the height of the subtree
L(v, w) of T rooted at the lowest common ancestor of v and w. The distance
captures the intuition that clients in the same city are more likely to be
connected than, for example, in the same state.

To model this intuition, generate a random network on the leaf nodes where
for a node v, the probability distribution of node v creating an edge to any
other node w is given by Eq. 6.1
$$\begin{aligned} p_{v}(w) = \frac{1}{Z}b^{-h(v,w)} \end{aligned}$$
(6.1)
where $$Z = \sum _{w \ne v}b^{-h(v,w)}$$ is a normalizing constant.

Next, set some parameter k and ensure that every node v has exactly k
outgoing edges, using the following procedure. For each node v, sample a
random node w according to $$p_{v}$$ and create edge (v, w) in the
network. Continue this until v has exactly k neighbours. Equivalently, after
an edge is added from v to w, set $$p_{v}(w)$$ to 0 and renormalize
with a new Z to ensure that $$\sum _{w} p(w) = 1$$. This results in a k-
regular directed network.

Now experimentally investigate a more general case where the edge

probability is proportional to $$b^{-\alpha h(v,w)}$$. Here
$$\alpha > 0$$ is a parameter in our experiments.

Consider a network with the setting $$h(T) = 10$$, $$b = 2$$,

$$k = 5$$, and a given $$\alpha $$, i.e, the network consists of all the
leaves in a binary tree of height 10; the out degree of each node is 5. Given
$$\alpha $$, create edges according to the distribution described above.

46

Create random networks for $$\alpha = 0.1, 0.2, \ldots , 10$$. For each of
these networks, sample 1000 unique random (s, t) pairs $$(s \ne t)$$.
Then do a decentralized search starting from s as follows. Assuming that
the current node is s, pick its neighbour u with smallest h(u, t) (break ties
arbitrarily). If $$u = t$$, the search succeeds. If $$h(s, t) > h(u, t)$$,
set s to u and repeat. If $$h(s, t) \le h(u, t)$$, the search fails.

For each $$\alpha $$, pick 1000 pairs of nodes and compute the average
path length for the searches that succeeded. Then draw a plot of the average
path length as a function of $$\alpha $$. Also, plot the search success
probability as a function of $$\alpha $$.

References

1. 1.
Clarke, Ian, Oskar Sandberg, Brandon Wiley, and Theodore W. Hong.
2001. Freenet: A distributed anonymous information storage and
retrieval system. In Designing privacy enhancing technologies, 46–66.
Berlin: Springer.
2. 2.
Lua, Eng Keong, Jon Crowcroft, Marcelo Pias, Ravi Sharma, and
Steven Lim. 2005. A survey and comparison of peer-to-peer overlay
network schemes. IEEE Communications Surveys & Tutorials 7 (2):
72–93.
3. 3.
Stoica, Ion, Robert Morris, David Liben-Nowell, David R. Karger,
M. Frans Kaashoek, Frank Dabek, and Hari Balakrishnan. 2003.
Chord: A scalable peer-to-peer lookup protocol for internet
applications. IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking (TON) 11 (1):
17–32.
4. 4.
Zhang, Hui, Ashish Goel, and Ramesh Govindan. 2002. Using the
small-world model to improve freenet performance. In INFOCOM
2002. Twenty-first annual joint conference of the IEEE computer and
communications societies. Proceedings. IEEE, vol. 3, 1228–1237.
IEEE.
© Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2018
Krishna Raj P.M., Ankith Mohan and K.G. Srinivasa, Practical Social Network Analysis with Python,
Computer Communications and Networks
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-96746-2_7

7. Signed Networks
Krishna Raj P. M.1 , Ankith Mohan1 and K. G. Srinivasa2

(1) Department of ISE, Ramaiah Institute of Technology, Bangalore,

Karnataka, India
(2) Department of Information Technology, C.B.P. Government
Engineering College, Jaffarpur, Delhi, India

Krishna Raj P. M.
Email: krishnarajpm@gmail.com

In many online social applications, users express positive or negative

attitudes or opinions in two ways:
Through actions. Eg: One user giving a “like” or a “rating”.
Through text. Eg: User “comments” and “reviews”.
These user expressions result in a signed network. A signed network is
defined as a network whose edges are associated with an explicit sign. More
formally, for a given link (u, v) between vertices u and v in this signed
network, the sign of this edge denoted by, s(u, v) is defined to be either
positive or negative depending on whether it expresses a positive or
negative attitude from the generator of the link to the recipient. Although
this definition is in the purview of directed signed networks, this also
applies to the undirected case.
Positive edges between vertices signify amity while negative edges
signify enmity.
The user expressions are more commonly known as user evaluations.
They reflect the overall levels of status in the community, i.e, the extent of
users’ past contributions or achievements and serve a crucial purpose in the
functioning of social applications, by directing users toward content that is
highly favoured, and (where applicable) enabling the formation of cohorts
of highly trusted users who guide the operation of the site.

7.1 Theory of Structural Balance

According to this theory, a triad is said to be balanced if and only if all
three of these edges are positive or exactly one of them is. In other words, a
triad is balanced if the sign of the product of the links equals one. This
property is called the structural balance property.
Therefore a triad that does satisfy the structural balance property is
called an unbalanced triad.
A balanced triad therefore fulfils the adage:
“The friend of my friend is my friend”.
“The enemy of my enemy is my friend”.
“The enemy of my friend is my enemy”.
“The friend of my enemy is my enemy”.
Figures 7.1, 7.2, 7.3 and 7.4 are instances of two balanced and two
unbalanced triads respectively.

../images/462433_1_En_7_Chapter/462433_1_En_7_Fig1_HTML.gif
Fig. 7.1 A, B and C are all friends of each other. Therefore this triad ( $$T_{3}$$ ) by satisfying
structural balance property is balanced

../images/462433_1_En_7_Chapter/462433_1_En_7_Fig2_HTML.gif
Fig. 7.2 A and B are friends. However, both of them are enemies of C. Similar to Fig. 7.1, this triad (
$$T_{1}$$ ) is balanced

../images/462433_1_En_7_Chapter/462433_1_En_7_Fig3_HTML.gif
Fig. 7.3 A is friends with B and C. However, B and C are enemies. Therefore the triad (
$$T_{2}$$ ) by failing to satisfy the structural balance property is unbalanced

../images/462433_1_En_7_Chapter/462433_1_En_7_Fig4_HTML.gif
Fig. 7.4 A, B and C are all enemies of one another. Similar to Fig. 7.3, the triad ( $$T_{0}$$ ) is
unbalanced
 A graph in which all possible triads satisfy the structural balance
property is called a balanced graph and one which does not is called an
unbalanced graph.
Figure 7.5 depicts a balanced and an unbalanced graph. The graph to the
left is balanced because all of the triads A,B,C; A,B,D; B,C,D and A,C,D
satisfy the structural balance property. However, the graph to the right is
unbalanced because the triads A,B,C and B,C,D do not satisfy the structural
balance property.

../images/462433_1_En_7_Chapter/462433_1_En_7_Fig5_HTML.gif
Fig. 7.5 A balanced (left) and an unbalanced (right) graph

This leads to the balance theorem which states that if a labelled

complete graph is balanced, then either all pairs of its vertices are friends
(this state is referred as “paradise” [3]) , or else the nodes can be divided
into two groups, X and Y, such that every pair of vertices in X are friends of
each other, every pair of vertices in Y are friends of each other, and
everyone in X is the enemy of everyone in Y (this state is called “bipolar”
[3]). Reference [6] reformulated this theorem to include multiple groups X,
Y, ..., Z, such that every pair of vertices in X, Y or Z are friends of each
other, and everyone in different groups are enemies of one another.
Reference [6] also made an argument that a triad where all edges bear a
negative sign is inherently balanced, therefore giving a weak structural
balance property. This property says that there is no triad such that the
edges among them consist of exactly two positive edges and one negative
edge.
Reference [11] found a closed-form expression for faction membership
as a function of initial conditions which implies that the initial amount of
friendliness in large social networks (started from random initial conditions)
determines whether they will end up as a paradise or a pair of bipolar sets.
Although identifying whether or not a graph is balanced merely
involves determining whether or not all of its triads satisfy the structural
balance property, this is a rather convoluted approach. A simpler approach
is as follows: Consider the signed graph shown in Fig. 7.6. To determine
whether or not this graph is balanced, we follow the procedure given below:

../images/462433_1_En_7_Chapter/462433_1_En_7_Fig6_HTML.gif
Fig. 7.6 A signed graph

1.
Identify the supernodes. Supernodes are defined as the connected
components where each pair of adjacent vertices have a positive edge.
If the entire graph forms one supernode, then the graph is balanced. If
there is a vertex that cannot be part of any supernode, then this vertex is
a supernode in itself. Figure 7.7 depicts the supernodes of Fig. 7.6.
Here, we see that the vertices 4, 11, 14 and 15 are supernodes by
themselves.
2.
Now beginning at a supernode we assign each of the supernodes to
groups X or Y alternatively. If every adjacent connected pair of
supernodes can be placed in different groups, then the graph is said to
be balanced. If such a placement is not possible, then the graph is
unbalanced. Figure 7.6 is unbalanced because, if we consider a
simplified graph of the supernodes (Fig. 7.8), then there are two ways
to bipartition these vertices starting from the vertex A: either A, C, G
and E are assigned to X with B, D and F assigned to Y or A, F, D and B
are assigned to X with E, G and C assigned to Y. In the first case, A and
E are placed in the same group while in the next case, A and B are
assigned to the same group. Since this is the case no matter which of
the vertices we start from, this graph is unbalanced.

../images/462433_1_En_7_Chapter/462433_1_En_7_Fig7_HTML.gif
Fig. 7.7 Supernodes of the graph in Fig. 7.6

../images/462433_1_En_7_Chapter/462433_1_En_7_Fig8_HTML.gif
Fig. 7.8 A simplified labelling of the supernodes for the graph in Fig. 7.6

This procedure however shows that the condition for a graph to be

balanced is very strict. Such a strict condition almost never applies in real
case scenarios. Alternatively, we come up with an approximate balanced
graph condition. According to this condition, let $$\epsilon $$ be any
number such that $$0 \le \epsilon < \frac{1}{8}$$, and define
$$\delta = (\epsilon )^{\frac{1}{3}}$$. If atleast
$$1 - \epsilon $$ of all triangles in a labelled completed graph are
balanced, then either
1.
there is a set consisting of atleast $$1 - \delta $$ of the vertices in
which atleast $$1 - \delta $$ of all the pairs are friends, or else
2.
the vertices can be divided into two groups, X and Y, such that
a.
atleast $$1-\delta $$ of the pairs in X are friends of one another
b.
atleast $$1-\delta $$ of the pairs in Y are friends of one another,
and
c.
atleast $$1-\delta $$ of the pairs with one end in X and the other
end in Y are enemies.

7.2 Theory of Status

The theory of status for signed link formation is based on an implicit
ordering of the vertices, in which a positive s(u, v) indicates that u considers
v to have higher status, while a negative s(u, v) indicates that u considers v
to have lower status.

7.3 Conflict Between the Theory of Balance and

Status
Consider the situation where A has a positive edge to B and B has a positive
edge to C. If C forms an edge to A, what should be the sign of this edge?
The theory of balance would suggest a positive sign to satisfy the structural
balance, while the theory of status would say that since A regards B as
having a higher status and B regards C as having a higher status, C should
regard A as having lower status and thus assign a negative sign to the link.
Therefore, the theory of balance and status are at odds with one another.
One must keep in mind that the balance theory disregards the direction
of the edges in the graph, while the status theory considers the edge’s
direction while making predictions.
In an attempt to investigate this conflict [10] studied three signed social
network datasets: the trust networks of the Epinions website, where users
can indicate their trust or distrust of reviews; the Slashdot blog, where users
can like or dislike comments; and the Wikipedia adminship voting network
where users can vote for or against the promotion of another. The statistics
of the dataset is as shown in Table 7.1.
Table 7.1 Dataset statistics

Epinions Slashdot Wikipedia

Nodes 119, 217 82, 144 7, 118
Edges 841, 200 549, 202 103, 747
$$+$$ edges $$85.0\%$$ $$77.4\%$$ $$78.7\%$$
− edges $$15.0\%$$ $$22.6\%$$ $$21.2\%$$
Triads 13, 375, 407 1, 508, 105 790, 532

Table 7.2 tabulates the number of all the balanced and unbalanced triads
in each of these datasets. Let p denote the fraction of positive edges in the
network, $$T_{i}$$ denote the type of the triad, $$|T_{i}|$$
denote the number of $$T_{i}$$, and $$p(T_{i})$$ denote the
fraction of triads $$T_{i}$$, computed as
$$p(T_{i}) = T_{i}/\Delta $$ where $$\Delta $$ denotes the
total number of triads. Now, we shuffle the signs of all the edges in the
graph (keeping the fraction p of positive edges the same), and we let
$$p_{0}(T_{i})$$ denote the expected fraction of triads that are of
type $$T_{i}$$ after this shuffling.
Table 7.2 Dataset statistics

$$T_{i}$$ $$|T_{i}|$$ $$p(T_{i})$$ $$p_{0}(T_{i})$$ $$s(T_{i})$$

Epinions
$$T_{3} {+}{+}{+}$$ 11, 640, 257 0.870 0.621 1881.1
$$T_{1} {+}{-}{-}$$ 947, 855 0.071 0.055 249.4
$$T_{2} {+}{+}{-}$$ 698, 023 0.052 0.321 $$-2104.8$$
$$T_{0} {-}{-}{-}$$ 89, 272 0.007 0.003 227.5
Slashdot
$$T_{3} {+}{+}{+}$$ 1, 266, 646 0.840 0.464 926.5
$$T_{1} {+}{-}{-}$$ 109, 303 0.072 0.119 $$-175.2$$
$$T_{2} {+}{+}{-}$$ 115, 884 0.077 0.406 $$-823.5$$
 $$T_{i}$$ $$|T_{i}|$$ $$p(T_{i})$$ $$p_{0}(T_{i})$$ $$s(T_{i})$$
$$T_{0} {-}{-}{-}$$ 16, 272 0.011 0.012 $$-8.7$$
Wikipedia
$$T_{3} {+}{+}{+}$$ 555, 300 0.702 0.489 379.6
$$T_{1} {+}{-}{-}$$ 163, 328 0.207 0.106 289.1
$$T_{2} {+}{+}{-}$$ 63, 425 0.080 0.395 $$-572.6$$
$$T_{0} {-}{-}{-}$$ 8, 479 0.011 0.010 10.8

If $$p(T_{i}) > p_{0}(T_{i})$$, then triads of type

$$T_{i}$$ are over-represented in the data relative to chance; if
$$p(T_{i}) < p_{0}(T_{i})$$, then they are under-represented. To
measure how significant this over- or under-representation is, we define the
surprise $$s(T_{i})$$ to be the number of standard deviations by
which the actual quantity of type- $$T_{i}$$ triads differs from the
expected number under the random-shuffling model. This surprise is
formally computed as given in Eq. 7.1
$$\begin{aligned} s(T_{i}) = (T_{i} - E[T_{i}])/\sqrt{\Delta p_{0} (7.1)
(T_{i})(1-p_{0}(T_{i}))} \end{aligned}$$
where $$E[T_{i}]$$ is the expected number of triads
$$T_{i}$$ computed as $$E[T_{i}] = p_{0}(T_{i})\Delta $$.
Table 7.2 shows that $$T_{3}$$ is heavily over-represented (
$$40\%$$ in all three datasets) and $$T_{2}$$ is heavily under-
represented ( $$75\%$$ in Epinions and Slashdot, $$50\%$$ in
Wikipedia).
The overall fraction of positive signs that a user creates, considering all
her links, is referred to as her generative baseline and the overall fraction of
positive signs in the links a user receives as her receptive baseline.

../images/462433_1_En_7_Chapter/462433_1_En_7_Fig9_HTML.gif
Fig. 7.9 All contexts (A,B;X) where the red edge closes the triad

There is the question of joint positive endorsement—if a node X links

positively to each of the two nodes A and B, and A now forms a link to B,
should there be an expected elevation in the probability of the link being
positive, or a reduced probability of the link being positive? Balance theory
would predict a positive link because A and B are both friends of X, they
must be friends of one another. Status theory, on the other hand, would
make two contradictory predictions. From the viewpoint of B, since she has
received a positive evaluation from X, she is more likely than not to have
above-average status. Therefore, A should more likely have a positive link
to B. However, from the perspective of A, since she has also been positively
evaluated by X, she is more likely than not to have above-average status.
Therefore, A is less likely to have a positive link to B. In other words, status
theory predicts that the evaluation will lie between A’s generative baseline
and B’s receptive baseline.
To deal with these contrasting predictions, a contextualized link (c-link)
is defined. The c-link is a triple (A,B;X) which evaluates the sign of a link
between A and B after each of A and B already has a link either to or from
X. This gives 16 distinct possible combinations depending on the direction
and sign of the link between A and X, and B and X. These 16 c-links
labelled $$t_{1}$$ to $$t_{16}$$ are as shown in Fig. 7.9.
Consider a particular type t of c-link and suppose ( $$A_{1}$$,
$$B_{1}$$; $$X_{1}$$), ( $$A_{2}$$, $$B_{2}$$;
$$X_{2}$$), ..., ( $$A_{k}$$, $$B_{k}$$;
$$X_{k}$$) are all instances of this type t of c-link in the data. The
generative baseline for this type t is defined as the sum of the generative
baselines of all vertices $$A_{i}$$. This gives the generative
surprise, $$s_{g}(t)$$ for this type t to be the number of standard
deviations by which the actual number of $$A_{i}-B_{i}$$ edges in
the data differs above or below this generative baseline. On similar lines,
the definitions for the receptive baseline and the receptive surprise,
$$s_{r}(t)$$.
To quantify the statuses of each of the users in a c-link, we start with X
having a status value of 0. If X links positively to A, or A links negatively to
X, then A gets a status value of 1, otherwise, A is assigned a status of
$$-1$$. The same applies to B. The generative surprise for type t is
said to be consistent with status if B’s status has the same sign as the
generative surprise: in this case, high-status recipients B receive more
positive evaluations than would be expected from the generative baseline of
the user A producing the link. Similarly, the receptive surprise for type t is
consistent with status if A’s status has the opposite sign from the receptive
surprise: high-status generators of links A produce fewer positive
evaluations than would be expected from the receptive baseline of the user
B receiving the link.
Similarly, balance is said to consistent with generative surprise for a
particular c-link type if the sign of the generative surprise is equal to the
sign of the edge as predicted by balance. Analogously, balance is consistent
with receptive surprise for a particular c-link type if the sign of the
receptive surprise is equal to the sign of the edge as predicted by balance.
Figure 7.10 shows that the prediction of status with respect to both the
generative and receptive surprise perform much better against the data that
the predictions of structural balance. This gives us some interesting
insights. First, we observe that one of the two c-link types where status is
inconsistent with generative surprise is the $$t_{3}$$ configuration.
This suggests that when such conditions arise, users of the systems may be
relying on balance-based reasoning more than status-based reasoning. In
addition, it shows that balance theory is a reasonable approximation to the
structure of signed networks when they are viewed as undirected graphs,
while status theory better captures many of the properties when the
networks are viewed in more detail as directed graphs that grow over time.

../images/462433_1_En_7_Chapter/462433_1_En_7_Fig10_HTML.gif
Fig. 7.10 Surprise values and predictions based on the competing theories of structural balance and
status

../images/462433_1_En_7_Chapter/462433_1_En_7_Fig11_HTML.gif
Fig. 7.11 Given that the first edge was of sign X, $$P(Y \mid X)$$ gives the probability that
reciprocated edge is of sign Y

../images/462433_1_En_7_Chapter/462433_1_En_7_Fig12_HTML.gif
Fig. 7.12 Edge reciprocation in balanced and unbalanced triads. Triads: number of
balanced/unbalanced triads in the network where one of the edges was reciprocated. P(RSS):
probability that the reciprocated edge is of the same sign. $$P(+ \mid +)$$ : probability that the
positive edge is later reciprocated with a plus. $$P(- \mid -)$$ : probability that the negative edge
is reciprocated with a minus

To understand the boundary between the balance and status theories and
where they apply, it is interesting to consider a particular subset of these
networks where the directed edges are used to create reciprocating
relationships. Figure 7.11 shows that users treat each other differently in the
context of reciprocating interactions than when they are using links to refer
to others who do not link back.
To consider how reciprocation between A and B is affected by the
context of A and B’s relationships to third nodes X, suppose that an A-B link
is part of a directed triad in which each of A and B has a link to or from a
node X. Now, B reciprocates the link to A. As indicated in Fig. 7.12, we find
that the B-A link is significantly more likely to have the same sign as the A-
B link when the original triad on A-B-X (viewed as an undirected triad) is
structurally balanced. In other words, when the initial A-B-X triad is
unbalanced, there is more of a latent tendency for B to “reverse the sign”
when she links back to A.
Transition of an Unbalanced Network to a Balanced One
A large signed network whose signs were randomly assigned was
almost surely unbalanced. This currently unbalanced network had to evolve
to a more balanced state with nodes changing their signs accordingly.
Reference [3] studied how a unbalanced network transitions to a balanced
one and focused on any human tendencies being exhibited.
They considered local triad dynamics (LTD) wherein every update step
chooses a triad at random. If this triad is balanced, $$T_{1}$$ or
$$T_{3}$$, no evolution occurs. If the triad is unbalanced,
$$T_{0}$$ or $$T_{2}$$, the sign of one of the links is
changed as follows: $$T_{2} \rightarrow T_{3}$$ occurs with
probability p, $$T_{2} \rightarrow T_{1}$$ occurs with probability
$$1-p$$, while $$T_{0} \rightarrow T_{1}$$ occurs with
probability 1. After an update step, the unbalanced triad becomes balanced
but this could cause a balanced triad that shares a link with this target to
become unbalanced. These could subsequently evolve to balance, leading to
new unbalanced triads.
They show that for $$p < \frac{1}{2}$$, LTD quickly drives an
infinite network to a quasi-stationary dynamic state. As p passes through a
critical value of $$\frac{1}{2}$$, the network undergoes a phase
transition to a paradise state. On the other hand, a finite network always
reaches a balanced state. For $$p < \frac{1}{2}$$, this balanced
state is bipolar and the time to reach this state scales faster than
exponentially with network size. For $$p \ge \frac{1}{2}$$, the final
state is paradise. The time to reach this state scales algebraically with N
when $$p = \frac{1}{2}$$, and logarithmically in N for
$$p > \frac{1}{2}$$.
They also investigated constrained triad dynamics (CTD). A random
link was selected, and the sign of this link was changed if the total number
of unbalanced triads decreases. If the total number of unbalanced triads is
conserved in an update, then the update occurs with probability
$$\frac{1}{2}$$. Updates that would increase the total number of
unbalanced triads are not allowed. On average each link is changed once in
a unit of time. A crucial outcome of this is that a network is quickly driven
to a balanced state in a time that scales as lnN .
What is most important with user evaluations is to determine what are
the factors that drive one’s evaluations and how a composite description
that accurately reflects the aggregate opinion of the community can be
created. The following are some of the studies that focus on addressing this
problem.
Reference [12] designed and analysed a large-scale randomized
experiment on a social news aggregation Web site to investigate whether
knowledge of such aggregates distorts decision-making . Prior ratings were
found to create significant bias in individual rating behaviour, and positive
and negative social influences were found to create asymmetric herding
effects. Whereas negative social influence inspired users to correct
manipulated ratings, positive social influence increased the likelihood of
positive ratings by $$32\%$$ and created accumulating positive
herding that increased final ratings by $$25\%$$ on average. This
positive herding was topic-dependent and affected by whether individuals
were viewing the opinions of friends or enemies. A mixture of changing
opinion and greater turnout under both manipulations together with a
natural tendency to up-vote on the site combined to create the herding
effects.
Reference [13] studied factors in how users give ratings in different
contexts, i.e, whether they are given anonymously or under one’s own name
and whether they are displayed publicly or held confidentially. They
investigated on three datasets, Amazon.com reviews, Epinions ratings, and
CouchSurfing.com trust and friendship networks, which were found to
represent a variety of design choices in how ratings are collected and
shared. The findings indicate that ratings should not be taken at face value,
but rather that one should examine the context in which they were given.
Public, identified ratings tend to be disproportionately positive, but only
when the ratee is another user who can reciprocate.
Reference [1] studied YahooAnswers (YA) which is a large and diverse
question answer community, acting not only as a medium for knowledge
sharing, but as a place to seek advice, gather opinions, and satisfy one’s
curiosity about things which may not have a single best answer. The fact
about YA that sets it apart from others is that participants believe that
anything from the sordid intricacies of celebrities’ lives to conspiracy
theories is considered knowledge, worthy of being exchanged. Taking
advantage of the range of user behaviour in YA, several aspects of question-
answer dynamics were investigated. First, content properties and social
network interactions across different YA categories (or topics) were
contrasted. It was found that the categories could be clustered according to
thread length and overlap between the set of users who asked and those who
replied. While, discussion topics or topics that did not focus on factual
answers tended to have longer threads, broader distributions of activity
levels, and their users tended to participate by both posing and replying to
questions, YA categories favouring factual questions had shorter thread
lengths on average and users typically did not occupy both a helper and
asker role in the same forum. It was found that the ego-networks easily
revealed YA categories where discussion threads, even in this constrained
question-answer format, tended to dominate. While many users are quite
broad, answering questions in many different categories, this was of a mild
detriment for specialized, technical categories. In those categories, users
who focused the most (had a lower entropy and a higher proportion of
answers just in that category) tended to have their answers selected as best
more often. Finally, they attempted to predict best answers based on
attributes of the question and the replier. They found that just the very basic
metric of reply length, along with the number of competing answers, and
the track record of the user, was most predictive of whether the answer
would be selected. The number of other best answers by a user, a potential
indicator of expertise, was predictive of an answer being selected as best,
but most significantly so for the technically focused categories.
Reference [8] explored CouchSurfing, an application which enables
users to either allow other users to sleep in their couch or sleep on someone
else’s couch. Due to security and privacy concerns, this application heavily
depends on reciprocity and trust among these users. By studing the surfing
activities, social networks and vouch networks, they found the following:
First, CouchSurfing is a community rife with generalized reciprocity, i.e,
active participants take on the role of both hosts and surfers, in roughly
equal proportion. About a third of those who hosted or surfed are in the
giant strongly connected component, such that one couch can be reached
from any other by following previous surfs. Second, the high degree of
activity and reciprocity is enabled by a reputation system wherein users
vouch for one another. They found that connections that are vouched, or
declared trustworthy can best be predicted based on the direct interaction
between the two individuals: their friendship degree, followed by the
overall experience from surfing or hosting with the other person, and also
how the two friends met. However, global measures that aim to propagate
trust, such as PageRank, are found to be poor predictors of whether an edge
is vouched. Although such metrics may be useful in assigning overall
reputation scores to individuals, they are too diffuse to predict specifically
whether one individual will vouch for another. Finally, the analysis revealed
a high rate of vouching: about a quarter of all edges that can be vouched
are, as are a majority of highly active users. While this could be reflection
of a healthy web of trust, there are indications that vouches may be given
too freely. The main reason behind this high rate of vouching may be its
public nature. It can be awkward for friends to not give or reciprocate a
vouch, even if privately they have reservations about the trustworthiness of
the other person.

7.4 Trust in a Network

Reference [7] proposed and analysed algorithms to develop a web of trust
that would allow users to express trust of other users, and in return would
apply the entire web of relationships and trusts to help a user assess the
likely quality of information before acting on it. Through such a web of
trust, a user can develop an opinion of another user without prior
interaction.
The first issue was that webs of trust tend to be relatively “sparse”:
every user has expressed trust values for only a handful of other users. The
problem is to determine trust values for the remaining user pairs using only
those which are explicitly specified.
 Assume a universe of n users, each of whom may optionally express
some level of trust and distrust for any other user. These entries will be
partitioned into two matrices, let T be the matrix of trusts; $$t_{ij}$$
is the trust that user i holds for user j. Similarly, let D be the matrix of
distrusts. Both $$t_{ij}$$ and $$d_{ij}$$ lie between 0 and 1.
From these matrices the intent is to predict an unknown trust/distrust value
between any two users, using the entries available in the trust and distrust
matrices. Now, let matrix B represent a set of beliefs that we initially hold
about the world, i.e, $$B_{ij}$$ might be i’s trust of j, i’s distrust of j,
or any of the possible combinations.

7.4.1 Atomic Propagations

The atomic propagations are a “basis set” of techniques by which the
system may infer that one user should trust or distrust another. The set is
constructed so that any inference regarding trust should be expressible as a
combination of elements of this set. The basis set is as follows:
1.
Direct propagation: If $$B_{ij} = 1$$, i.e, i trusts j and
$$B_{jk} = 1$$, i.e, j trusts k, then we could conclude that
$$B_{ik} = 1$$, i.e, i trusts k. This operation is referred to as direct
propagation since the trust propagated directly along an edge. Such
direct propagations are represented as a matrix M such that all
conclusions expressible by these direct propagation can be read from
the matrix $$B \cdot M$$. The appropriate matrix M to encode direct
propagation is simply B itself: in this case $$B \cdot M = B ^{2}$$,
which is the matrix of all length-2 paths in the initial belief graph.
Thus, B itself is the operator matrix that encodes the direct propagation
basis element.
2. Co-citation: If $$B_{i_{1}j_{1}} = 1$$, $$B_{i_{1}j_{2}} = 1$$
and $$B_{i_{2}j_{2}} = 1$$, i.e, $$i_{1}$$ trusts $$j_{1}$$
and $$j_{2}$$, and $$i_{2}$$ trusts $$j_{2}$$, then we
conclude that $$i_{2}$$ should also trust $$j_{1}$$. Here,
$$B \cdot M = BB^{T}B$$ will capture all beliefs that are inferable
through a single co-citation. The sequence $$B^{T}B$$ can be
viewed as a backward-forward step propagating $$i_{2}$$’s trust of
$$j_{2}$$ backward to $$i_{1}$$, then forward to $$j_{1}$$.
Therefore, the operator M for this atomic propagation is
$$B^{T}B$$
 $$B^{T}B$$.
3.
Transpose trust: Here i’s trust of j causes j to develop some level of
trust towards i. In this case, $$M = B^{T}$$.
4.
Trust coupling: When both i and j trust k, this implies that i trusts j.
This makes $$M = BB^{T}$$.
If
$$\alpha = (\alpha _{1}, \alpha _{2}, \alpha _{3}, \alpha _{4})$$ is a
vector representing weights for combining these four atomic propagation
schemes. Then all these atomic propagations can be captured into a single
combined matrix $$C_{B,\alpha }$$ based on a belief matrix B and a
weight vector $$\alpha $$ as follows:
$$\begin{aligned} C_{B,\alpha } = \alpha _{1}B + \alpha _{2}B^{T}B +
\alpha _{3}B^{T} + \alpha _{4}BB^{T} \end{aligned}$$
$$C_{B,\alpha }$$ is a matrix whose ijth entry describes how beliefs
should flow from i to j via an atomic propagation step; if the entry is 0, then
nothing can be concluded in an atomic step about i’s views on j.

7.4.2 Propagation of Distrust

Let $$k\in \mathbb {Z}^{+}$$, and $$P^{(k)}$$ be a matrix whose
ijth entry represents the propagation from i to j after k atomic propagations.
The following are three models defined on B and P(k) for the propagation
of trust and distrust, given initial trust and distrust matrices T and D
respectively:
1.
Trust only: By completely disregarding distrust scores and propagating
only the trust scores, we get: $$B = T$$ and
$$P^{(k)} = C_{B,\alpha }^{(k)}$$.
2.
One-step distrust: When a user distrusts someone, they discount all
their judgements. Therefore, distrust propagates only one step, giving
us: $$B = T$$ and $$P^{(k)} = C_{B,\alpha } \cdot (T-D)$$.
3.
Propagated distrust: When trust and distrust both propagate together,
we get: $$B = T-D$$ and $$P^{(k)} = C_{B,\alpha }^{(k)}$$.
7.4.3 Iterative Propagation
The end goal is to produce a final matrix F that has the trust or distrust
between any pair of users in this universe. There are two approaches to
computing F from the sequence of propagations:
1.
Eigenvalue propagation(EIG): If $$K\ \epsilon \ \mathbb {Z}$$, then
$$F = P^{(K)}$$.
2.
Weighted linear combinations(WLC): If $$\gamma $$ is a discount
factor that is smaller than the largest eigenvalue of
$$C_{B,\alpha }$$ and $$K\ \epsilon \ \mathbb {Z}$$, then
$$F = \sum \limits _{k=1}^{K}\gamma ^{k}\cdot P^{(k)}$$.

7.4.4 Rounding
The next problem encountered was that of converting a continuous value
into a discrete one ( $$\pm 1$$). There were the following three ways of
accomplishing this rounding:
1.
Global rounding: This rounding tries to align the ratio of trust to
distrust values in F to that in the input M. In the row vector
$$F_{i}$$, i trusts j if and only if $$F_{ij}$$ is within the top
$$\tau $$ fraction of entries of the vector $$F_{i}$$. This
threshold $$\tau $$ is chosen based on the overall relative fractions
of trust and distrust in the input.
2.
Local rounding: Here, we account for the trust/distrust behavior of i.
The conditions for $$F_{ij}$$ and $$\tau $$ are same as the
previous definition.
3. Majority rounding: This rounding intends to capture the local structure
of the original trust and distrust matrix. Consider the set J of users on
whom i has expressed either trust or distrust. If J is a set of labelled
examples using which we are to predict the label of a user j,
$$j\ \notin \ J$$. We order J along with j according to the entries
$$F_{ij'}$$ where $$j' \in J \cup \{j\}$$. At the end of this, we
have an ordered sequence of trust and distrust labels with the unknown
label for j embedded in the sequence at a unique location. From this,
we predict the label of j to be that of the majority of the labels in the
 smallest local neighbourhood surrounding it where the majority is well-
defined.
Epinions
For this study, the Epinions web of trust was constructed as a directed
graph consisting of 131, 829 nodes and 841, 372 edges, each labelled either
trust or distrust. Of these labelled edges, $$85.29\%$$ were labelled
trust; we interpret trustto be the real value $$+1.0$$ and distrust to be
$$-1.0$$.
The combinations of atomic propagations, distrust propagations,
iterative propagations and rounding methods gave 81 experimental
schemes. To determine whether any particular algorithm can correctly
induce the trust or distrust that i holds for j, a single trial edge (i, j) is
masked from the truth graph, and then each of the 81 schemes is asked to
guess whether i trusts j. This trial was performed on 3, 250 randomly
masked edges for each of the 81 schemes, resulting in 263, 000 total trust
computations, and depicted in Fig. 7.13. In this table, $$\epsilon $$
denotes the prediction error of an algorithm and a given rounding method,
i.e., $$\epsilon $$ is the fraction of incorrect predictions made by the
algorithm.

../images/462433_1_En_7_Chapter/462433_1_En_7_Fig13_HTML.gif
Fig. 7.13 Prediction of the algorithms. Here, $$e^{*} = (0.4, 0.4, 0.1, 0.1)$$ , $$K = 20$$

The trust edges in the graph outnumber the distrust edges by a huge
margin: 85 versus 15. Hence, a naive algorithm that always predicts “trust”
will incur a prediction error of only $$15\%$$. Nevertheless, the
results are first reported for prediction on randomly masked edges in the
graph, as it reflects the underlying problem. However, to ensure that the
algorithms are not benefiting unduly from this bias, the largest balanced
subset of the 3, 250 randomly masked trial edges are taken such that half
the edges are trust and the other half are distrust—this is done by taking all
the 498 distrust edges in the trial set as well as the 498 randomly chosen
trust edges from the trial set. Thus, the size of this subset S is 996. The
prediction error in S is called $$\epsilon _{S}$$. The naive prediction
error on S would be $$50\%$$.
 They found that even a small amount of information about distrust
(rather than information about trust alone) can provide tangibly better
judgements about how much user i should trust user j, and that a small
number of expressed trusts/distrust per individual can allow prediction of
trust between any two people in the system with surprisingly high accuracy.

7.5 Perception of User Evaluation

Reference [5] reasoned that the evaluation of an opinion is fundamentally
different from reasoning about the opinion itself: instead of say,“What did
Y think of X?”, look at, “What did Z think of Y’s opinion of X?”. For this
study, they picked Amazon.com, one of the largest online e-commerce
providers whose website includes not just product reviews contributed by
users, but also evaluations of the helpfulness of these reviews. Here, each
review comes with both a star rating—the number of stars it assigns to the
product—and a helpfulness vote—the information that a out of b people
found the review itself helpful.
A dataset consisting of over 4 million book reviews of roughly 675, 000
books on Amazon’s US site, as well as smaller but comparably- sized
corpora from Amazon’s UK, Germany, and Japan sites were used. Of these
reviews, more than 1 million received atleast 10 helpfulness votes each.
The following four hypothesis were considered:

../images/462433_1_En_7_Chapter/462433_1_En_7_Fig14_HTML.gif
Fig. 7.14 Helpfulness ratio declines with the absolute value of a review’s deviation from the
computed star average. The line segments within the bars indicate the median helpfulness ratio; the
bars depict the helpfulness ratio’s second and third quantiles. Grey bars indicate that the amount of
data at that x value represents $$0.1\%$$ or less of the data depicted in the plot

1.
The conformity hypothesis: This hypothesis holds that a review is
evaluated as more helpful when its star rating is closer to the consensus
star rating for the product.
2. The individual-bias hypothesis: According to this hypothesis, when a
user considers a review, she will rate it more highly if it expresses an
opinion that she agrees with. However, one might expect that if a
diverse range of individuals apply this rule, then the overall helpfulness
evaluation could be hard to distinguish from one based on conformity.
3.

The brilliant-but-cruel hypothesis: This hypothesis arises from the

argument that “negative reviewers are perceived as more intelligent,
competent, and expert than positive reviewers.”
4.
The quality-only straw-man hypothesis: There is the possibility that
helpfulness is being evaluated purely based on the textual content of
the reviews, and that these non-textual factors are simply correlates of
textual quality.
The helpfulness ratio of a review is defined to be the fraction of
evaluators who found it to be helpful (in other words, it is the fraction
$$\frac{a}{b}$$ when a out of b people found the review helpful).
The product average for a review of a given product is defined to be the
average star rating given by all reviews of that product. Figure 7.14 shows
that the median helpfulness ratio of reviews decreases monotonically as a
function of the absolute difference between their star rating and the product
average. This is consistent with the conformity hypothesis: reviews in
aggregate are deemed more helpful when they are close to the product
average. However, to assess the brilliant-but-cruel hypothesis, we must look
not at the absolute difference between a review’s star rating and its product
average, but at the signed difference, which is positive or negative
depending on whether the star rating is above or below the average.
Figure 7.15 shows that not only does the median helpfulness as a function
of signed difference fall away on both sides of 0; it does so asymmetrically:
slightly negative reviews are punished more strongly, with respect to
helpfulness evaluation, than slightly positive reviews. This is at odds with
both the brilliant-but-cruel hypothesis as well as the conformity hypothesis.

../images/462433_1_En_7_Chapter/462433_1_En_7_Fig15_HTML.gif
Fig. 7.15 Helpfulness ratio as a function of a review’s signed deviation

To investigate the oddity, we group products by the variance of the star

ratings assigned to it by all its reviews, and perform the signed-difference
analysis on sets of products having fixed levels of variance. Figure 7.16
shows that the effect of signed difference to the average changes smoothly
but in a complex fashion as the variance increases. The role of variance can
be summarized as follows.
When the variance is very low, the reviews with the highest helpfulness
ratios are those with the average star rating.
With moderate values of the variance, the reviews evaluated as most
helpful are those that are slightly above the average star rating.
As the variance becomes large, reviews with star ratings both above and
below the average are evaluated as more helpful than those that have the
average star rating (with the positive reviews still deemed somewhat
more helpful).
This is a clear indication that variance is a key factor that any
hypothesis needs to incorporate.

../images/462433_1_En_7_Chapter/462433_1_En_7_Fig16_HTML.gif
Fig. 7.16 As the variance of the star ratings of reviews for a particular product increases, the median
helpfulness ratio curve becomes two-humped and the helpfulness ratio at signed deviation 0
(indicated in red) no longer represents the unique global maximum

For a given review, let the computed product-average star rating be the
average star rating as computed over all reviews of that product in the
dataset.
To investigate straw-man quality-only hypothesis, we must review the
text quality. To avoid the subjectiveness that may be involved when human
evaluators are used, a machine learning algorithm is trained to
automatically determine the degree of helpfulness of each review. For
$$i,j\in \{0,0.5,\ldots ,3.5\}$$ where $$i < j$$,
$$i \succ j$$ when the helpfulness ratio of reviews, with absolute
deviation i is significantly larger than for reviews with absolute deviation j.
Reference [5] explains a model that can explain the observed behaviour.
We evaluate the robustness of the observed social-effects phenomena by
comparing review data from three additional different national Amazon
sites: Amazon.co.uk (UK), Amazon.de (Germany) and Amazon.co.jp
(Japan). The Japanese data exhibits a left hump that is higher than the right
one for reviews with high variance, i.e., reviews with star ratings below the
mean are more favored by helpfulness evaluators than the respective
reviews with positive deviations (Fig. 7.17).
 ../images/462433_1_En_7_Chapter/462433_1_En_7_Fig17_HTML.gif
Fig. 7.17 Signed deviations vs. helpfulness ratio for variance = 3, in the Japanese (left) and U.S.
(right) data. The curve for Japan has a pronounced lean towards the left

They found that the perceived helpfulness of a review depends not just
on its content but also in subtle ways on how the expressed evaluation
relates to other evaluations of the same product.

7.6 Effect of Status and Similarity on User

Evaluation
Some of the most commonly found social applications that greatly rely on
these user evaluations are.
Table 7.3 Wikipedia statistics. $$N =$$ number of votes, $$P_{0}(+)$$ $$=$$ baseline
fraction of positive votes, $$U =$$ number of users

Wikipedia language N $$P_{0}(+)$$ U

English 119489 $$74.5\%$$ 10558
German 78647 $$67.7\%$$ 3560
French 22534 $$78.0\%$$ 1552
Spanish 8641 $$83.4\%$$ 917

Wikipedia is a collaboratively authored free encyclopedia. Active users

can be nominated for promotion to admin privilege status. Once
nominated, a public deliberation process begins and other Wikipedia
users cast either positive, negative, or neutral votes on the candidate.
Votes are public, signed by the voter, and timestamped. After enough
time has passed, a Wikipedia official reviews the votes and discussion
and decides whether the election was successful or not. A public record
of the election is archived online. Table 7.3 tabulates a public record of
election from English, German, French and Spanish Wikipedias.
Stack Overflow is a popular question-answering site for programmers.
Users post questions and answers, and can upvote or downvote other
users’ questions and answers. Heavily upvoted answers are prominently
displayed on the question page, and heavily upvoted questions are
publicized on the site. There is a visible reputation system that assigns a
 score to each user on the site. Users gain/lose reputation by receiving
upvotes/downvotes on the content they produce. Users cannot downvote
freely; it costs them a small amount of reputation to do so. There were
$$1.1\,$$M questions, 3.2 M answers, and 7.5 M votes (1.8 M on
questions, 5.7 M on answers) from the site’s inception in 2008–2011.
$$93.4\%$$ of the votes are positive, and for each vote we know the
identity of the voter and the time it occurred. Who voted on what is not
publicly displayed on the site. Questions are annotated with tags
describing relevant topics. There are 31 K unique tags and 3.6 M tag
events.
Epinions is an online reviewing site where users can review products and
rate each others’ reviews. Our dataset has 132 K users, 1.5 M reviews,
and 13.6 M ratings of those reviews (on a scale of 1–5 stars). The ratings
are overwhelming positive ( $$78\%$$ are 5-star ratings), so we call a
5-star rating a “positive” evaluation and all others “negative”.
The question is: “When multiple people all provide evaluations of the
same “target” person, how to create a composite description of these
evaluations that accurately reflects some type of cumulative opinion of the
community?” In an attempt to answer this question, [2] found that similarity
in the characteristics of two users—such as the extent to which their
contributions to the site have involved similar content, or have involved
interactions with a common set of other users—can affect the evaluation
one user provides of another. They also found how the interaction of
similarity and status can produce strong effects, and that evaluations are less
status-driven when users are more similar to each other; and evaluations are
particularly low among users of roughly equal status.
They describe user A evaluating a user B as shorthand either for a direct
evaluation of B herself, or for an indirect evaluation via content that B has
authored.
The authors have defined the following two notions of similarity.
Users are represented by the “actions” they take. By action, we mean
editing an article on Wikipedia, asking or answering a question on Stack
Overflow, and rating a review on Epinions. Let user u’s binary action
vector be a vector of length M (where M is the number of all possible
actions a user can take) with a 1 in the ith position if u took action i at
least once, and 0 otherwise. The similarity between users u and v is then
 the cosine between their respective binary action vectors:
$$s(u,v) = \frac{u_{a}\cdot v_{a}}{||u_{a}|| \cdot ||v_{a}||}$$ (where
$$u_{a}$$ is u’s binary action vector). If either $$||u_{a}|| = 0$$ or
$$||v_{a}|| = 0$$ (either u or v hasn’t taken any actions), then we say
s(u, v) is undefined and exclude it from calculations. A user’s action
vector changes over time as they make more actions. Whenever we
compute the similarity s(E, T) between an evaluator E and a target T, we
use the action vectors corresponding to the time at which E evaluated T.
This is called the content similarity.
A user is characterized by a vector of other users that a user has
evaluated and define similarity between two users as the cosine between
their corresponding binary evaluation vectors. This is called the social
similarity.

7.6.1 Effect of Similarity on Evaluation

The investigation on how similarity affected the probability of a positive
evaluation gave the following results. On Wikipedia the probability of a
positive evaluation grows with the content as well as social similarity
between the evaluator and the target. On average, overlapping interests with
the target make it more likely that an evaluator will cast a positive vote.
Figure 7.18 shows the probability of a positive vote as a function of the
cosine between the evaluator and target binary edit vectors (averaging over
all values of $$\Delta $$). The monotonically-increasing, diminishing-
returns relationship between them is clearly present. For ease of
presentation, Wikipedia plots are restricted to English Wikipedia for the
remainder of this section. The results are similar across all Wikipedia
datasets, except where explicitly stated.

../images/462433_1_En_7_Chapter/462433_1_En_7_Fig18_HTML.gif
Fig. 7.18 Probability of a positive evaluation ( $$P(+)$$ ) as a function of the similarity (binary
cosine) between the evaluator and target edit vectors (s(e, t)) in Wikipedia

On Stack Overflow, the effect of similarity on evaluations is more

nuanced. The more similar an evaluator-target pair is, the more likely the
evaluation is positive. But in contrast to Wikipedia, the strength of this
relationship depends on which notion of similarity is used. The similarity
on tags is a measure of content similarity and the similarity on evaluations
is a measure of social similarity. Figure 7.19 plots the fraction of positive
evaluations as a function of these two measures of similarity. Since the
scale of the cosine values are different for the two measures, we normalize
by their respective cumulative distribution functions so that we compare
percentiles instead of raw values on the x-axis. We find that $$P(+)$$
increases with tag-similarity very gradually for most of the data (from the
25th to the 80th percentile, $$P(+)$$ only increases by
$$0.5\%$$, a relative gain of $$7\%$$). But for evaluation-
similarity, $$P(+)$$ is higher than it is for tag-similarity (except for
$$s = 0$$) and rises much more significantly (for the same range,
$$P(+)$$ increases $$1.5\%$$, a relative gain of
$$21\%$$—3 times as much). This suggests that the social orbits
users travel in influence evaluations much more than the topics they’re
interested in. Similar effects were found for content similarity on Epinions
while social similarity turns out to be too sparse to be meaningful in
Epinions.

../images/462433_1_En_7_Chapter/462433_1_En_7_Fig19_HTML.gif
Fig. 7.19 Probability of E positively evaluating T as a function of similarity in Stack Overflow

7.6.2 Effect of Status on Evaluation

A user’s status, or standing in the community, is a function of the
community’s perception of her contributions. User u’s status, denoted as
$$\sigma _{u}$$, at time t is defined as the number of actions u has taken
before time t (i.e. the number of non-zero entries in her corresponding
binary action vector $$u_{a}$$ at time t). Thus the status, on Wikipedia
is the total number of edits made by a user u before time t; on Stack
Overflow, the total number of questions asked and answers; and on
Epinions, the number of ratings given.
The differential status, $$\Delta = \sigma _{E} - \sigma _{T}$$
compare the evaluator’s status with the target’s status. It was observed that
if an evaluator and target have similar action profiles, the vote varies less
with their status difference than if the evaluator and target operate in
different domains. This is shown in Fig. 7.20, where $$P(+)$$ is
plotted as a function of $$\Delta $$ for different levels of similarity in
English Wikipedia.
 ../images/462433_1_En_7_Chapter/462433_1_En_7_Fig20_HTML.gif
Fig. 7.20 Probability of E voting positively on T as a function of $$\Delta $$ for different levels
of similarity in English Wikipedia

../images/462433_1_En_7_Chapter/462433_1_En_7_Fig21_HTML.gif
Fig. 7.21 Probability of E voting positively on T as a function of $$\Delta $$ for different levels
of similarity on Stack Overflow for a all evaluators b no low status evaluators

../images/462433_1_En_7_Chapter/462433_1_En_7_Fig22_HTML.gif
Fig. 7.22 Similarity between E and T pairs as a function of $$\Delta $$ for a English Wikipedia
and b Stack Overflow

../images/462433_1_En_7_Chapter/462433_1_En_7_Fig23_HTML.gif
Fig. 7.23 Probability of E positively evaluating T versus $$\sigma _{T}$$ for various fixed
levels of $$\Delta $$ in Stack Overflow

The trend is somewhat similar on Stack Overflow as depicted in

Fig. 7.21 for $$P(+)$$ versus $$\Delta $$ plot. When
$$\Delta > 0$$, the picture is qualitatively the same as in
Wikipedia: the higher the similarity, the higher $$P(+)$$ is. But for
$$\Delta < 0$$, the situation is very different: the similarity curves
are in the opposite order from before: evaluators with low similarity to the
higher-status targets (since $$\Delta < 0$$) are more positive than
evaluators with high similarity. This is due to a particular property of Stack
Overflow’s reputation system, in which it costs a user a small amount of
reputation to downvote a question or answer (issue a negative evaluation).
This creates a dis-incentive to downvote which is most strongly felt by
users with lower reputation scores (which correlates with our measure of
status on Stack Overflow). When the low-status evaluators (
$$\sigma _{E} < 100$$), this effect disappears and the overall
picture looks the same as it does on Wikipedia.
In Wikipedia elections, we find that the evaluator’s similarity to the
target depends strongly on $$\Delta $$ while this does not happen on
Stack Overflow or Epinions. This is shown in Fig. 7.22.
Figure 7.23 plots the fraction of positive evaluations $$P(+)$$
against the target’s status $$\sigma _{T}$$ within several narrow
 $$\Delta $$ ranges on Stack Overflow. If the status difference is really
how users compare their status against others, then we would expect that
these curves are approximately flat, because this would imply that for pairs
separated by $$\Delta $$, evaluation positivity does not depend on
what their individual statuses are, and that the level of these constant curves
depends on $$\Delta $$, so that different $$\Delta $$ values
result in different evaluation behaviour. However, $$\Delta $$ does
not control the result well for extremely low target status values, where
evaluators are much more negative than just the difference in status would
otherwise suggest. This is because the poor quality of targets with low
status overwhelms the difference in status between evaluator and target.
Thus absolute status, and not differential status, is the main criterion
evaluators use to evaluate very low-status targets.

7.6.3 Aggregate User Evaluation

At small positive $$\Delta $$, there appears to be a “dip” and subsequent
rebound in Fig. 7.24. This suggests that users are particularly harsh on each
other when they have approximately the same status. However, this is at
odds with the findings in the previous subsection that users who are similar
in other dimensions tend to be more positive toward each other.

../images/462433_1_En_7_Chapter/462433_1_En_7_Fig24_HTML.gif
Fig. 7.24 Dip in various datasets

When we examine $$P(+)$$ as a function of $$\Delta $$,

we are aggregating over the two different regimes of user evaluations. In
the previous subsection, we showed that evaluation behaviour is
qualitatively different for low-status targets. Since most evaluators in the
data have relatively low status, this implies that most evaluations in the
absolute status evaluation regime will have small positive $$\Delta $$
values. And since these evaluations are much more negative than those
made in the relative status regime, this can cause a dip slightly to the right
of 0. This explains the anomaly in the case of Stack Overflow and Epinions
but in the case of Wikipedia, the dip persists even when we eliminate
targets of low status. The high similarity between evaluator and target, and
the observation that higher-status evaluators are more similar to the target
than lower-status evaluators are contribute to this non-monotonicity in
Wikipedia.

7.6.4 Ballot-Blind Prediction

The problem of ballot-blind prediction is formally defined as follows.
Knowing only the first few users $$A_{1}$$, $$A_{2}$$, ...,
$$A_{k}$$ who evaluate another user B and their attributes (similarity to
B and relative status)—but not the actual evaluations—can we make
accurate predictions about the outcome of the election? The crucial point
being that we do not have access to the evaluations provided by
$$A_{1}$$, $$A_{2}$$, ..., $$A_{k}$$, but only to their attributes
as individuals relative to user B. In other words, can we infer an audience’s
approval or disapproval of a piece of content purely from the makeup of the
audience.
Here, we focus on predicting administrator promotion on Wikipedia
from the early voters, without looking at the sign of their votes. Just by
looking at properties of the first few voters who show up (and importantly,
their similarity with the candidate up for election), we attempt to predict
whether the election succeeds or not.
Formally, a Wikipedia adminship election (T, $$\omega $$, R) is
specified by a target (or candidate) T , a set of ordered votes
$$\omega $$, and a result $$R \epsilon \{+1, -1\}$$ denoting
whether T was promoted or not. Each vote
$$v_{i} \epsilon \omega $$ is a tuple ( $$E_{i}$$,
$$s_{i}$$, $$t_{i}$$) where $$E_{i}$$ is the evaluator,
$$s_{i} \epsilon \{+1, -1\}$$ denotes whether the vote is positive or
negative (disregarding neutral votes), and $$t_{i}$$ is the time when
$$E_{i}$$ cast the vote. The votes are sorted by time, so
$$t_{1}< t_{2}< \cdots < t_{m}$$ , where m is the number of
votes cast in the election. The task is to predict R from the first k votes
$$v_{1}, \ldots , v_{k}$$ (without looking at the sign
$$s_{i}$$ of each vote) using the similarity and status of the
evaluators relative to the target.
In English Wikipedia, the data consisted of approximately 120, 000
votes made by approximately 7, 600 unique voters across 3, 422 elections
on 2, 953 distinct candidates. (The number of elections exceeds the number
of distinct candidates since some candidates go up for election more than
once). $$k = 5$$ is used in the experiments. The performance is
evaluated using accuracy on leave-one-out cross-validation, where the
model is trained on the entire dataset minus one example and is tested on
the example for every example in the dataset.
For each vote $$v_{i}$$ , the identity of the evaluator
$$E_{i}$$, her similarity $$s(E_{i}, T)$$ with the target, her
status $$\sigma _{E_{i}}$$, and the status difference
$$\Delta _{i} = \sigma _{E_{i}} - \sigma _{T}$$ between her and
the target. Positivity is voter i’s historical fraction of positive votes
$$P_{i}$$ (excluding the current vote, since this the value to be
predicted). If i has no other votes in the dataset, their positivity is defined to
be the global positivity across the entire dataset (the overall fraction of
positive votes across all voters).
Two classes of features were used:
Simple Summary Statistics (S) of the status and similarity of the target
and the evaluators: $$log(\sigma _{T})$$, mean similarity
$$\overline{s} = \sum \limits _{i=1}^{k} \frac{s(v_{i}, T)}{k}$$ and
$$\overline{\Delta } = \sum \limits _{i=1}^{k} \frac{(\sigma _{E_{i}}
- \sigma _{T})}{k}$$
.
$$\Delta $$-s space is divided into four quadrants as shown in
Fig. 7.25, divided by $$\Delta = 0$$ and a similarity value that roughly
splits the evaluations into two equally-sized buckets. This gives us four
features where each simply counts the number of voters coming from a
particular $$\Delta $$-s quadrant.

../images/462433_1_En_7_Chapter/462433_1_En_7_Fig25_HTML.gif
Fig. 7.25 The Delta-similarity half-plane. Votes in each quadrant are treated as a group

Three baselines were formulated:

B1: A logistic regression classifier that uses the 4 features of
$$\Delta $$-s quadrants and the S statistics.
B2: The probability of voter $$E_{i}$$ voting positively (without
considering his relation to the candidate). The probability of user
$$E_{i}$$ voting positively $$P(E_{i} = 1)$$ is estimated as the
empirical fraction $$E_{i}$$’s votes that are positive. The estimated
 fraction of positive votes in an election is simply the average
$$\frac{1}{k}\sum \limits _{i=1}^{k}P_{i}$$ of the first k voters.
GS: The “gold-standard” represents the best possible performance that
can be achieved. It “cheats” by examining the values of actual votes
themselves ( $$s_{i}$$, for $$i \le k$$), computes the empirical
fraction of positive votes and learns the optimal threshold to predict the
election outcome.
The methods developed were:
M1: M1 models the probability that $$E_{i}$$ votes positively as
$$P(E_{i} = 1) = P_{i} + d(\Delta _{i}, s_{i})$$, where $$P_{i}$$
is $$E_{i}$$’s positivity, and $$d(\Delta _{i}, s_{i})$$ is the
average deviation of the fraction of positive votes in the
$$\Delta _{i}$$, $$s_{i}$$ bucket compared to the overall fraction
of positive votes across the entire dataset. The average
$$P(E_{i} = 1)$$ for $$i = 1\ldots k$$ is computed and then made
threshold for prediction.
M2: $$P(E_{i} = 1)$$ is modelled as
$$P(E_{i} = 1) = \alpha \cdot P_{i}(\Delta _{i}, s_{i}) + (1 - \alpha )
\cdot d(\Delta _{i}, s_{i} )$$
. $$\alpha $$ between 0.6 and 0.9 is used for computation.
Figure 7.26 plots the classification accuracy for the models on English
Wikipedia as well as German Wikipedia (French and Spanish Wikipedia
were very similar to the German results). Here, the prior refers to the
accuracy of random guessing.

../images/462433_1_En_7_Chapter/462433_1_En_7_Fig26_HTML.gif
Fig. 7.26 Ballot-blind prediction results for a English Wikipedia b German Wikipedia

These results demonstrate that without even looking at the actual votes,
it is possible to derive a lot of information about the outcome of the election
from a small prefix of the evaluators. Very informative implicit feedback
could be gleaned from a small sampling of the audience consuming the
content in question, especially if previous evaluation behaviour by the
audience members is known.
7.7 Predicting Positive and Negative Links
Reference [9] investigated relationships in Epinions, Slashdot and
Wikipedia. They observed that the signs of links in the underlying social
networks can be predicted with high accuracy using generalized models.
These models are found to provide insight into some of the fundamental
principles that drive the formation of signed links in networks, shedding
light on theories of balance and status from social psychology. They also
suggest social computing applications by which the attitude of one user
towards another can be estimated from evidence provided by their
relationships with other members of the surrounding social network.
The study looked at three datasets.
The trust network of Epinions data spanning from the inception of the
site in 1999 until 2003. This network contained 119, 217 nodes and
841, 000 edges, of which $$85.0\%$$ were positive. 80, 668 users
received at least one trust or distrust edge, while there were 49, 534 users
that created at least one and received at least one signed edge. In this
network, s(u, v) indicates whether u had expressed trust or distrust of user
v.
The social network of the technology-related news website Slashdot,
where u can designate v as either a “friend” or “foe” to indicate u’s
approval or disapproval of v’s comments. Slashdot was crawled Slashdot
in 2009 to obtain its network of 82, 144 users and 549, 202 edges of
which $$77.4\%$$ are positive. 70, 284 users received at least one
signed edge, and there were 32, 188 users with non-zero in- and out-
degree.
The network of votes cast by Wikipedia users in elections for promoting
individuals to the role of admin. A signed link indicated a positive or
negative vote by one user on the promotion of another. Using the January
2008 complete dump of Wikipedia page edit history all administrator
election and vote history data was extracted. This gave 2, 794 elections
with 103, 747 total votes and 7, 118 users participating in the elections.
Out of this total, 1, 235 elections resulted in a successful promotion,
while 1, 559 elections did not result in the promotion of the candidate.
The resulting network contained 7, 118 nodes and 103, 747 edges of
which $$78.7\%$$ are positive. There were 2, 794 nodes that received
 at least one edge and 1, 376 users that both received and created signed
edges. s(u, v) indicates whether u voted for or against the promotion of v
to admin status.
In all of these networks the background proportion of positive edges is
about the same, with $$\approx \!80\%$$ of the edges having a
positive sign.
The aim was to answer the question: “How does the sign of a given link
interact with the pattern of link signs in its local vicinity, or more broadly
throughout the network? Moreover, what are the plausible configurations of
link signs in real social networks?” The attempt is to infer the attitude of
one user towards another, using the positive and negative relations that have
been observed in the vicinity of this user. This becomes particularly
important in the case of recommender systems where users’ pre-existing
attitudes and opinions must be deliberated before recommending a link.
This involves predicting the sign of the link to be recommended before
actually suggesting this.
This gives us the edge sign prediction problem. Formally, given a social
network with signs on all its edges, but the sign on the edge from node u to
node v, denoted s(u, v), has been “hidden”. With what probability can we
infer this sign s(u, v) using the information provided by the rest of the
network? In a way, this problem is similar to the problem of link prediction.

7.7.1 Predicting Edge Sign

Given a directed graph $$G = (V, E)$$ with a sign (positive or negative)
on each edge, let s(x, y) denote the sign of the edge (x, y) from x to y, i.e,
$$s(x, y) = 1$$ when the sign of (x, y) is positive, $$-1$$ when the sign
is negative, and 0 when there is no directed edge from x to y. In cases where
we are interested in the sign of edge (x, y) regardless of its direction, we
write $$\overline{s} (x, y) = 1$$ when there is a positive edge in one of
the two directions (x, y) or (y, x), and either a positive edge or no edge in
the other direction. We write $$\overline{s} (x, y) = -1$$ analogously
when there is a negative edge in one of these directions, and either a
negative edge or no edge in the other direction. We write
$$\overline{s} (x, y) = 0$$ in all other cases (including when there are
edges (x, y) and (y, x) with opposite signs, though this is in fact rare). For
different formulations, we will suppose that for a particular edge (u, v), the
sign s(u, v) or $$\overline{s} (u, v)$$ is hidden and that we are trying to
infer it.
There are two classes of features. The first class of features, based on
degree, is as follows. As we are interested in predicting the sign of the edge
from u to v, we consider outgoing edges from u and incoming edges to v.
$$d_{in}^{+}(v)$$ and $$d_in^{-}(v)$$ denotes the number of
incoming positive and negative edges to v, respectively. Similarly,
$$d_{out}^{+}(u)$$ and $$d_{out}^{-}(u)$$ denotes the
number of outgoing positive and negative edges from u, respectively.
C(u, v) denotes the total number of common neighbours of u and v in an
undirected sense, i.e, the number of nodes w such that w is linked by an
edge in either direction with both u and v. C(u, v) is sometimes also referred
to as the embeddedness of the edge (u, v). In summary, the features in this
class are: $$d_{in}^{+}(v)$$, $$d_{in}^{-}(v)$$, ,
$$d_{out}^{-}(u)$$, C(u, v), together with the total out-degree of u
and the total in-degree of v, which are
$$d_{out}^{+}(u) + d_{out}^{-}(u)$$ and
$$d_{in}^{+}(v) + d_{in}^{-}(v)$$ respectively.
For the second class of feature, we consider each triad involving the
edge (u, v), consisting of a node w such that w has an edge either to or from
u and also an edge either to or from v. Since, the edge between w and u can
be in either direction and of either sign, and the edge between w and v can
also be in either direction and of either sign; this leads to
$$2 \times 2 \times 2 \times 2 = 16$$ distinct possibilities. Each of
these 16 triad types may provide different evidence about the sign of the
edge from u to v, some favouring a negative sign and others a positive sign.
All of this is encoded in a 16-dimensional vector specifying the number of
triads of each type that (u, v) is involved in.
Logistic regression was applied to learn the sign of an edge based on
these 23 features. The full dataset containing $$80\%$$ positive edges
are first used. Next, a balanced dataset was created with equal numbers of
positive and negative edges, so that random guessing yields a
$$50\%$$ correct prediction rate. The classification accuracy is
shown in Fig. 7.27, for different levels of minimum embeddedness (
$$E_{m}$$).
 ../images/462433_1_En_7_Chapter/462433_1_En_7_Fig27_HTML.gif
Fig. 7.27 Accuracy of predicting the sign of an edge based on the signs of all the other edges in the
network in a Epinions, b Slashdot and c Wikipedia

The coefficients provided by logistic regression when associated with

each feature suggests how the feature is being used by the model to provide
weight for or against a positive edge sign. Specifically, we say that a theory
of triad types is a function
$$\begin{aligned} f : \{types\ \tau \} \rightarrow \{+1, -1, 0\}
\end{aligned}$$
which specifies for each triad type $$\tau $$ whether it constitutes
evidence for a positive (u, v) edge $$(f(\tau ) = +1)$$, evidence for a
negative (u, v) edge $$(f(\tau ) = -1)$$, or whether it offers no
evidence $$(f(\tau ) = 0)$$.
For studying balance, we see that if w forms a triad with the edge (u, v),
then (u, v) should have the sign that causes the triangle on u, v, w to have an
odd number of positive signs, regardless of edge direction. In other words,
$$f_{balance}(\tau ) = \overline{s} (u, w) \overline{s} (v, w)$$. In
order to determine $$f_{status}(\tau )$$, we first flip the directions of
the edges between u and w and between v and w, so that they point from u
to w and from w to v; we flip the signs accordingly as we do this. We then
define $$f_{status}(\tau )$$ to be the sign of
$$s(u, w) + s(w, v)$$. The accuracy of predicting signs considering
these balance and status coefficients is depicted in Fig. 7.28. Here,
StatusLrn and BalanceLrn denote the coefficients learned via logistic
regression. The coefficients from $$\{-1, 0, +1\}$$ provided by
balance, weak balance and status are denoted by BalanceDet, WeakBalDet
and StatusDet respectively.

../images/462433_1_En_7_Chapter/462433_1_En_7_Fig28_HTML.gif
Fig. 7.28 Accuracy of predicting the sign of an edge based on the signs of all the other edges in the
network in a Epinions, b Slashdot and c Wikipedia

Next the following handwritten heuristic predictors were considered:

Balance heuristic (Balance): For each choice of the sign of (u, v), some
of the triads it participates in will be consistent with balance theory, and
 the rest of the triads will not. We choose the sign for (u, v) that causes it
to participate in a greater number of triads that are consistent with
balance.
Status heuristic (StatDif): An estimate of a node x’s status is
$$\sigma _{x} = d_{in}^{+}(x) + d_{out}^{-}(x) - d_{out}^{+}(x) -
d_{in}^{-}(x)$$
. This gives x status benefits for each positive link it receives and each
negative link it generates, and status detriments for each negative link it
receives and each positive link it generates. We then predict a positive
sign for (u, v) if $$\sigma _{u} \le \sigma _{v}$$, and a negative sign
otherwise.
Out-degree heuristic (OutSign): We predict the majority sign based on
the signs given by the edge initiator u, i.e, we predict a positive sign if
$$d_{out}^{+}(u) \ge d_{out}^{-}(u)$$.
In-degree heuristic (InSign): We predict the majority sign based on the
signs received by the edge target v, i.e, we predict a poisitive sign if
$$d_{in}^{+}(u) \ge d_{in}^{-}(v)$$.
These predictors are plotted in Fig. 7.29 as a function of embeddedness.

../images/462433_1_En_7_Chapter/462433_1_En_7_Fig29_HTML.gif
Fig. 7.29 Accuracy for handwritten heuristics as a function of minimum edge embeddedness

In addition to sign prediction, the study focused at whether information

about negative links can be helpful in addressing questions that concern
purely positive links, i.e, given a pair u and v, is there a positive link
between u and v? If so, how much performance is improved if the negative
links in the network are also visible. In other words, how useful is it to
know where a person’s enemies are, if we want to predict the presence of
additional friends? The study found that negative links can be a powerful
source of additional information for a task such as this. This type of result
helps to argue that positive and negative links in online systems should be
viewed as tightly related to each other, rather than as distinct non-
interacting features of the system.
Reference [4] studied Essembly.com, a “fiercely non-partisan social
network” that allows members to post resolves reflecting controversial
opinions. Members can then vote on these resolves, using a four-point
scale: Agree, Lean Agree, Lean Against, or Against. Users can only vote
once per resolve, and all their votes are viewable by other members,
forming an ideological profile. Instead of a plain “friend request”, this
social network apart allows users to form three semantically distinct but
overlapping types of connections: friend request, ally request: a person who
shares the same ideologies as the person being requested, and nemesis
request: a person who has opposite ideologies to the person being
requested. They found that users are affected differently by their friends,
allies and nemesis, indicating that people use these distinct connections for
different purposes.
They conclude that social applications that encourage online
socialization and registration of users’ “friends” may compel people to add
as “friends” people whom they know only superficially or who don’t hold
much influence over them. Therefore, the use of this friends network to
make recommendations or to influence users may then be diminished.
Therefore, sites seeking to exploit the influence exerted by friends in
changing behaviour or making recommendations should provide multiple
classes of friendship. The closer a user is to recommending friends, the
stronger the persuasion is likely to be.

Problems
Download the signed Epinions social network dataset available at https://
snap.stanford.edu/data/soc-sign-epinions.txt.gz.
Consider the graph as undirected and compute the following:

47 Calculate the count and fraction of triads of each type in this network.

48 Calculate the fraction of positive and negative edges in the graph. Let
the fraction of positive edges be p. Assuming that each edge of a triad will
independently be assigned a positive sign with probability p and a negative
sign with probability $$1 - p$$, calculate the probability of each type of
triad.

49 Now, analyse a simple generative model of signed networks by

running simulations of the dynamic process on small networks in the
following manner. Create a complete network on 10 nodes. For each edge,
choose a sign with uniform probability. Run this dynamic process for a
million iterations. Repeat this process 100 times. What fraction of these
networks are balanced?

References
1. Adamic, Lada A., Jun Zhang, Eytan Bakshy, and Mark S. Ackerman. 2008. Knowledge sharing
and Yahoo answers: Everyone knows something. In Proceedings of the 17th international
conference on World Wide Web, 665–674. ACM.

2. Anderson, Ashton, Daniel Huttenlocher, Jon Kleinberg, and Jure Leskovec. 2012. Effects of user
similarity in social media. In Proceedings of the fifth ACM international conference on Web
search and data mining, 703–712. ACM.

3. Antal, Tibor, Pavel L. Krapivsky, and Sidney Redner. 2005. Dynamics of social balance on
networks. Physical Review E 72(3):036121.

4. Brzozowski, Michael J., Tad Hogg, and Gabor Szabo. 2008. Friends and foes: Ideological social
networking. In Proceedings of the SIGCHI conference on human factors in computing systems,
817–820. ACM.

5. Danescu-Niculescu-Mizil, Cristian, Gueorgi Kossinets, Jon Kleinberg, and Lillian Lee. 2009.
How opinions are received by online communities: A case study on Amazon. com helpfulness
votes. In Proceedings of the 18th international conference on World Wide Web, 141–150. ACM.

6. Davis, James A. 1963. Structural balance, mechanical solidarity, and interpersonal relations.
American Journal of Sociology 68 (4): 444–462.

7. Guha, Ramanthan, Ravi Kumar, Prabhakar Raghavan, and Andrew Tomkins. 2004. Propagation
of trust and distrust. In Proceedings of the 13th international conference on World Wide Web,
403–412. ACM.

8. Lauterbach, Debra, Hung Truong, Tanuj Shah, and Lada Adamic. 2009. Surfing a web of trust:
Reputation and reciprocity on couchsurfing. com. In 2009 International conference on
computational science and engineering (CSE’09), vol. 4, 346–353. IEEE.

9. Leskovec, Jure, Daniel Huttenlocher, and Jon Kleinberg. 2010. Predicting positive and negative
links in online social networks. In Proceedings of the 19th international conference on World
Wide Web, 641–650. ACM.

10. Leskovec, Jure, Daniel Huttenlocher, and Jon Kleinberg. 2010. Signed networks in social media.
In Proceedings of the SIGCHI conference on human factors in computing systems, 1361–1370.
ACM.

11. Marvel, Seth A., Jon Kleinberg, Robert D. Kleinberg, and Steven H. Strogatz. 2011. Continuous-
time model of structural balance. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 108 (5):
1771–1776.

12. Muchnik, Lev, Sinan Aral, and Sean J. Taylor. 2013. Social influence bias: A randomized
experiment. Science 341(6146):647–651.
13. Teng, ChunYuen, Debra Lauterbach, and Lada A. Adamic. 2010. I rate you. You rate me. Should
we do so publicly? In WOSN.
© Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2018
Krishna Raj P.M., Ankith Mohan and K.G. Srinivasa, Practical Social Network Analysis with Python,
Computer Communications and Networks
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-96746-2_8

8. Cascading in Social Networks

Krishna Raj P. M.1 , Ankith Mohan1 and K. G. Srinivasa2

(1) Department of ISE, Ramaiah Institute of Technology, Bangalore,

Karnataka, India
(2) Department of Information Technology, C.B.P. Government
Engineering College, Jaffarpur, Delhi, India

Krishna Raj P. M.
Email: krishnarajpm@gmail.com

Cascades are periods during which individuals in a population exhibit herd-

like behaviour because they are making decisions based on the actions of
other individuals rather than relying on their own information about the
problem. Cascades are often regarded as a specific manifestation of the
robust yet fragile nature of many complex systems: a system may appear
stable for long periods of time and withstand many external shocks, then
suddenly and apparently inexplicably exhibit a large cascade [17].

8.1 Decision Based Models of Cascade

Consider the following coordination game that helps to better understand
decision based cascading. Consider a situation in a social network where
every node has to decide between two possible behaviours, A and B. If
nodes v and w are neighbours, then it would be of mutual benefit if both of
them adopted the same behaviour. The possible payoffs between the players
and the behaviours are as follows: if both v and w adopt behaviour A, they
each get a payoff of $$a > 0$$; if they both adopt B, they each get a
payoff of $$b > 0$$; and if they adopt opposite behaviours, then they
each get a payoff of 0. This is better illustrated in the payoff matrix given in
Table 8.1.
Each node v is faced with the choice of adopting a certain behaviour
taking into consideration the payoffs it will receive from each of its
neighbour. Figure 8.1 shows node v’s predicament. In the figure, p fraction
of v’s neighbours adopt behaviour A, while $$(1-p)$$ fraction have
behaviour B. So if d denotes the degree of v, then v will receive a payoff of
pda if it adopts behaviour A, and v will receive a payoff of
$$(1-p)db$$ if it adopts behaviour B. Therefore, A is a better choice if
$$\begin{aligned} pda \ge (1-p)db \end{aligned}$$ (8.1)
Rearranging the terms in Eq. 8.1, we get
$$\begin{aligned} p \ge \frac{b}{a+b} \end{aligned}$$ (8.2)
If we denote the right had side term as q ( $$q = \frac{b}{a+b}$$),
then q can be called the threshold . This gives us the threshold rule : if
atleast a q fraction of v’s neighbours adopt a specific behaviour, then in
terms of payoff, it is beneficial for v to also adopt this behaviour.
Table 8.1 A-B coordination game payoff matrix

A B
A a,a 0,0
B 0,0 b,b

../images/462433_1_En_8_Chapter/462433_1_En_8_Fig1_HTML.gif
Fig. 8.1 v must choose between behaviours A and B based on its neighbours behaviours

In the long run, this behaviour adoption leads to one of the following
states of equilibria. Either everyone adopts behaviour A, or everyone adopts
behaviour B. Additionally, there exists a third possibility where nodes
adopting behaviour A coexist with nodes adopting behaviour B. In this
section, we will understand the network circumstances that will lead to one
of these possibilities.
Assume a network where every node initially has behaviour B. Let a
small portion of the nodes be early adopters of the behaviour A. These early
adopters choose A for reasons other than those guiding the coordination
game, while the other nodes operate within the rules of the game. Now with
every time step, each of these nodes following B will adopt A based on the
threshold rule. This adoption will cascade until one of the two possibilities
occur: Either all nodes eventually adopt A leading to a complete cascade ,
or an impasse arises between those adopting A and the ones adopting B
forming a partial cascade .
Figures 8.2, 8.3, 8.4 and 8.5 all show an example of a complete cascade.
In this network, let the payoffs be $$a = 4$$ and $$b = 5$$, and
the initial adopters be v and w. Assuming that all the nodes started with
behaviour B. In the first time step, $$q = \frac{5}{9}$$ but
$$p = \frac{2}{3}$$ for the nodes r and t, and
$$p = \frac{1}{3}$$ for the nodes s and u. Since the p for nodes r and
t is greater than q, r and t will adopt A. However, the p for nodes s and u is
less than q. Therefore these two nodes will not adopt A. In the second time
step, $$p = \frac{2}{3}$$ for the nodes s and u. p being greater than q
cause the remaining two nodes to adopt the behaviour, thereby causing a
complete cascade.

../images/462433_1_En_8_Chapter/462433_1_En_8_Fig2_HTML.gif
Fig. 8.2 Initial network where all nodes exhibit the behaviour B

../images/462433_1_En_8_Chapter/462433_1_En_8_Fig3_HTML.gif
Fig. 8.3 Nodes v and w are initial adopters of behaviour A while all the other nodes still exhibit
behaviour B

../images/462433_1_En_8_Chapter/462433_1_En_8_Fig4_HTML.gif
Fig. 8.4 First time step where r and t adopt behaviour A by threshold rule

../images/462433_1_En_8_Chapter/462433_1_En_8_Fig5_HTML.gif
Fig. 8.5 Second time step where s and u adopt behaviour A also by threshold rule

Figures 8.6, 8.7 and 8.8 illustrate a partial cascade. Similar to the
complete cascade depiction, we begin with a network where all the nodes
exhibit behaviour B with payoffs $$a = 3$$ and $$b = 2$$. The
nodes 7 and 8 are the initial adopters, and $$q = \frac{2}{5}$$. In the
first step, node 5 with $$p = \frac{2}{3}$$ and node 10 with
$$p = \frac{1}{2}$$ are the only two nodes that can change
behaviour to A. In the second step, node 4 has $$p = \frac{2}{3}$$
and node 9 has $$p = \frac{1}{1}$$, causing them to switch to A. In
the third time step, node 6 with $$p = \frac{2}{3}$$ adopts A.
Beyond these adoptions, there are no possible cascades leading to a partial
cascade of behaviour A.

../images/462433_1_En_8_Chapter/462433_1_En_8_Fig6_HTML.gif
Fig. 8.6 Initial network where all nodes have behaviour B

../images/462433_1_En_8_Chapter/462433_1_En_8_Fig7_HTML.gif
Fig. 8.7 Nodes 7 and 8 are early adopters of behaviour A while all the other nodes exhibit B

../images/462433_1_En_8_Chapter/462433_1_En_8_Fig8_HTML.gif
Fig. 8.8 After three time steps there are no further cascades

There are two ways for a partial cascade to turn into a complete
cascade. The first way is for the payoff of one of the behaviours to exceed
the other. In Fig. 8.6, if the payoff a is increased, then the whole network
will eventually switch to A. The other way is to coerce some critical nodes
of one of the behaviours to adopt the other. This would restart the cascade,
ending in a complete cascade in favour of the coerced behaviour. In
Fig. 8.6, if nodes 12 and 13 were forced to adopt A, then this would lead to
a complete cascade. Instead, if 11 and 14 were coerced to switch, then there
would be no further cascades.
Partial cascades are caused due to the fact that the spread of a new
behaviour can stall when it tries to break into a tightly-knit community
within the network, i.e, homophily can often serve as a barrier to diffusion,
by making it hard for innovations to arrive from outside densely connected
communities. More formally, consider a set of initial adopters of behaviour
A, with a threshold of q for nodes in the remaining network to adopt
behaviour A. If the remaining network contains a cluster of density greater
than $$1 - q$$, then the set of initial adopters will not cause a
complete cascade. Whenever a set of initial adopters does not cause a
complete cascade with threshold q, the remaining network must contain a
cluster of density greater than $$1 - q$$.
The above discussed models work on the assumption that the payoffs
that each adopter receives is the same, i.e, a for each adopter of A and b for
each adopter of B. However, if we consider the possibility of node specific
payoff, i.e, every node v receives a payoff $$a_{v}$$ for adopting A
and payoff $$b_{v}$$ for taking B. So the payoff matrix in such a
coordination game is as shown in Table 8.2.
Table 8.2 Coordination game for node specific payoffs

A B
A $$a_{v},a_{w}$$ 0, 0
B 0, 0 $$b_{v},b_{w}$$

On the same lines as the previous coordination game we arrive at the

Eq. 8.3
$$\begin{aligned} p \ge \frac{b_{v}}{a_{v}+b_{v}} (8.3)
\end{aligned}$$
Here, we can define $$q_{v} = \frac{b_{v}}{a_{v}+b_{v}}$$ as the
personal threshold of v. So, this will give a personal threshold rule
whereby v will take the behaviour adopted by atleast $$q_{v}$$ of its
neighbours.

8.1.1 Collective Action

Collective action problems are those where an activity produces benefit
only if enough people participate. Situations such as protest against a
repressive regime work only with collective action. If only a handful of
demonstrators staged a protest, these protesters would simply be arrested
and thereby end the revolt. Instead if a large group were mobilised, the
government would be weakened and everyone including the demonstrators
would benefit. However, this large group will assemble if and only if every
individual in the group is assured of the fact that the number of other
protesters being present is greater than this individual’s personal threshold.
In other words, the success of this demonstration is incumbent upon the
common knowledge of all of these protesters, i.e, among the protesters in
this group, each protester knows that a number greater than their personal
threshold is going to be mobilised, each protester knows that every protester
knows it, each protester knows that every protester knows that each of the
protesters know it, and so on indefinitely. The various forms of mass media
and social network applications usually help people achieve this common
knowledge. Additionally, it is observed that although a large fraction of a
group are in support of a radical idea, most believe that they are in a small
minority and it is way too risky for them to get involved. This phenomenon
is termed as pluralistic ignorance . To maintain a state of pluralistic
ignorance by preventing the spread of common knowledge, is the reason
why governments usually curb the freedom of press during protests and
why repressive governments work so hard towards achieving censorship.

8.1.2 Cascade Capacity

The cascade capacity is defined with respect to an infinite network as the
largest threshold at which a finite set of nodes can cause a complete
cascade.
Consider a network with infinite nodes where each node is connected to
a finite set of these nodes. Let a finite set S of these nodes have behaviour A
while the rest of the network exhibits behaviour B. In each time step t, each
of these nodes initially exhibiting behaviour B adopt A based on their
threshold. So, the cascade capacity of this network is the largest value of q
for which S can cause complete cascade.
First, let us consider what happens if the network is an infinite path.
Even if just one node in this network is an early adopter of A while all other
nodes exhibit B, a value of $$q \le \frac{1}{2}$$ is sufficient for a
complete cascade while $$q > \frac{1}{2}$$ fails to do so.
Therefore in the case of an infinite path, the cascade capacity is
$$\frac{1}{2}$$.
Next, we will look at an infinite grid as shown in Fig. 8.9. Let the nine
nodes in black be the early adopters of behaviour A while the other nodes
exhibit behaviour B. Here, if the threshold $$q \le \frac{3}{8}$$ then
there will be a complete cascade. First the nodes c, i, h and n will adopt A,
followed by b, d, f, g, j, k, m and o, and then the others. Thus, the cascade
capacity of this network is $$\frac{3}{8}$$.

../images/462433_1_En_8_Chapter/462433_1_En_8_Fig9_HTML.gif
Fig. 8.9 An infinite grid with 9 early adopters of behaviour A while the others exhibit behaviour B

8.1.3 Co-existence of Behaviours

Reference [9] sought to understand how a new technology A might spread
through a social network of individuals who are currently users of
technology B, and how diffusion works when there exist a group of these
individuals who can manage both A and B (bilingual ).
Suppose there are two instant messenger (IM) systems A and B, which
are not interoperable, i.e, users must be on the same system in order to
communicate. There is a social network G on the users, indicating who
wants to talk to whom, and the endpoints of each edge (v, w) play a
coordination game with possible strategies A or B: if v and w each choose
IM system B, then they they each receive a payoff of q; if they each choose
IM system A, then they they each receive a payoff of $$1-q$$; and if
they choose opposite systems, then they each receive a payoff of 0. A
becomes the “better” technology if $$q < \frac{1}{2}$$, in the
sense that $$A-A$$ payoffs would then exceed $$B-B$$
payoffs, while A is the “worse” technology if $$q > \frac{1}{2}$$.
If all nodes initially play B, and a small number of nodes begin adopting
strategy A instead, the best response would be to switch to A if enough of a
user’s neighbours have already adopted A. As this unfolds, cascading will
occur where either all nodes switch to A, or there will exist a state of co-
existence where some users use A, others use B, with no interoperability
between these two groups.
However, we see that the real-world contains examples where co-
existence occurs. Windows coexisting with Mac OS, or Android coexisting
with iOS. The point of interest is that these coexisting groups are not
completely isolated. There exists a region of overlap between these groups,
i.e, there are certain users who are able to use both of the choices and thus
act as the bridge between the groups.
Considering that our IM system becomes as follows. Users can choose
among three strategies, A, B and AB (in which both A and B are used). An
adopter of AB gets to use, on an edge-by-edge basis, whichever of A or B
yields higher payoffs in each interaction. However, AB has to pay a fixed
cost c for being bilingual. The payoffs now become as shown in Table 8.3.
Table 8.3 Payoff matrix

A B AB
A $$1-q,1-q$$ 0, 0 $$1-q,1-q-c$$
B 0, 0 q, q $$q,q-c$$
AB $$1-q-c,1-q$$ $$q-c,q$$ $$max(q,1-q)-c,max(q,1-q)-c$$
 Let us consider that G is infinite and each node has a degree
$$\Delta \in \mathbb {N}$$. The per-edge cost for adopting AB is
defined as $$r = c/\Delta $$.
Reference [9] found that for values of q close to but less than
$$\frac{1}{2}$$, strategy A can cascade on the infinite line if r is
sufficiently small or sufficiently large, but not if r takes values in some
intermediate interval. In other words, strategy B (which represents the
worse technology, since $$q < \frac{1}{2}$$) will survive if and
only if the cost of adopting AB is calibrated to lie in this middle interval.
The explanation for this is as follows:
When r is very small, it is cheap for nodes to adopt AB as a strategy, and
so AB spreads through the whole network. Once AB is everywhere, the
best-response updates cause all nodes to switch to A, since they get the
same interaction benefits without paying the penalty of r.
When r is very large, nodes at the interface, with one A neighbour and
one B neighbour, will find it too expensive to choose AB, so they will
choose A (the better technology), and hence A will spread step-by-step
through the network.
When r takes an intermediate value, a node with one A neighbour and
one B neighbour, will find it most beneficial to adopt AB as a strategy.
Once this happens, the neighbour who is playing B will not have
sufficient incentive to switch, and the updates make no further progress.
Hence, this intermediate value of r allows a “boundary” of AB to form
between the adopters of A and the adopters of B.
Therefore, the situation facing B is this: if it is too permissive, it gets
invaded by AB followed by A; if it is too inflexible, forcing nodes to choose
just one of A or B, it gets destroyed by a cascade of direct conversions to A.
But if it has the right balance in the value of r, then the adoptions of A come
to a stop at a boundary where nodes adopt AB.
Reference [9] also shows that when there are three competing
technologies, two of these technologies have an incentive to adopt a limited
“strategic alliance” , partially increasing their interoperability to defend
against a new entrant.

8.1.4 Cascade Capacity with Bilinguality

Here, we will look at the following question: Given an infinite network with
three possible behaviours, A, B and AB, and payoff values of a for adopting
A, b for adopting B and max(a, b) for adopting AB with an incurred cost c
for bilinguality; what is the largest threshold at which a finite set adopting A
can cause a complete cascade when the rest of the network adopts B?
In the case of an infinite path, instead of looking at it in the perspective
of a sequence of time steps, we will look at what a certain node will do
when it is faced with the choice between different behaviours from each of
its neighbour.

8.1.4.1 Choice between A and B

We look at the graph in Fig. 8.10 where w is sandwiched between a
neighbour with behaviour A and neighbour adopting behaviour B.

../images/462433_1_En_8_Chapter/462433_1_En_8_Fig10_HTML.gif
Fig. 8.10 The payoffs to node w on an infinite path with neighbours exhibiting behaviour A and B

Here, w receives a payoff of a if it chooses A; it receives a payoff of 1

for choosing B; and a payoff of $$a+1-c$$ for adopting AB. The
logical thing for w is to adopt the behaviour that gives it the highest payoff.
The $$a-c$$ plot in Fig. 8.11 gives us a simpler way to look at the
payoffs. These lines intersect at (1, 1) and gives six regions. We see that A
is the best strategy in two of these regions, B is the best in two of them, and
AB is the best in other two.

../images/462433_1_En_8_Chapter/462433_1_En_8_Fig11_HTML.gif
Fig. 8.11 By dividing the a-c plot based on the payoffs, we get the regions corresponding to the
different choices

8.1.4.2 Choice Between AB and B

The graph in Fig. 8.12 gives us the situation where w is placed between a
node with behaviour AB and another exhibiting B.

../images/462433_1_En_8_Chapter/462433_1_En_8_Fig12_HTML.gif
Fig. 8.12 The payoffs to node w on an infinite path with neighbours exhibiting behaviour AB and B
 If $$a < 1$$, then B will provide w with the highest payoff
regardless of the value of c. Instead, let $$a \ge 1$$ and
$$b = 2$$ (if w adopts behaviour B, it can interact with both of its
neighbours). Similar to the case where w was sandwiched between
neighbours exhibiting A and B, $$a-c$$ plot as shown in Fig. 8.13
simplifies the view of the payoffs. This $$a-c$$ plot shows a diagonal
line segment from the point (1, 0) to the point (2, 1). To the left of this line
segment, B wins and the cascade stops. To the left of this line segment, AB
wins—so AB continues spreading to the right, and behind this wave of
AB’s, nodes will steadily drop B and use only A.

../images/462433_1_En_8_Chapter/462433_1_En_8_Fig13_HTML.gif
Fig. 8.13 The a-c plot shows the regions where w chooses each of the possible strategies

Figure 8.14 summarises the possible cascade outcomes based on the

values of a and c. The possibilities are: (i) B is favoured by all nodes
outside the initial adopter set, (ii) A spreads directly without help from AB,
(iii) AB spreads for one step beyond the initial adopter set, but then B is
favoured by all nodes after that, (iv) AB spreads indefinitely to the right,
with nodes subsequently switching to A.

../images/462433_1_En_8_Chapter/462433_1_En_8_Fig14_HTML.gif
Fig. 8.14 The plot shows the four possible outcomes for how A spreads or fails to spread on the
infinite path, indicated by this division of the (a, c)-plane into four regions

Models are developed to understand systems where users are faced with
alternatives and the costs and benefits of each depend on how many others
choose which alternative. This is further complicated when the idea of a
“threshold” is introduced. The threshold is defined as the proportion of
neighbours who must take a decision so that adoption of the same decision
by the user renders the net benefits to exceed the net costs for this user.
Reference [8] aimed to present a formal model that could predict, from
the initial distribution of thresholds, the final proportion of the users in a
system making each of the two decisions, i.e, finding a state of equilibrium.
Let the threshold be x, the frequency distribution be f(x), and the cumulative
distribution be F(x). Let the proportion of adopters at time t be denoted by
r(t). This process is described by the difference equation
 $$r(t+1) = F[r(t)]$$. When the frequency distribution has a simple
form, the difference equation can be solved to give an expression for r(t) at
any value of t. Then, by setting $$r(t+1) = r(t)$$, the equilibrium
outcome can be found. However, when the functional form is not simple,
the equilibrium must be computed by forward recursion. Graphical
observation can be used to compute the equilibrium points instead of
manipulating the difference equations. Let’s start with the fact that we know
r(t). Since $$r(t+1) = F[r(t)]$$, this gives us $$r(t+1)$$.
Repeating this process we find the point $$r_{e}$$ at
$$F[r_{e}] = r_{e}$$. This is illustrated in Fig. 8.15.

../images/462433_1_En_8_Chapter/462433_1_En_8_Fig15_HTML.gif
Fig. 8.15 Graphical method of finding the equilibrium point of a threshold distribution

Consider an infinite population of players. Each player interacts with

some finite subset of the population and must choose one of two actions (0
and 1) to play against all neighbours. Let $$\Gamma (x)$$ denote the
set of neighbours of x. There exists a critical number $$0 \le q \le 1$$
such that action 1 is the best response for a player if at least proportion q of
the neighbours plays 1. The payoff of a player is denoted as
$$u(a,a')$$ if the player chooses the action a and the neighbour
chooses the action $$a'$$. This payoff function gives the symmetric
payoff matrix shown in Table 8.4.
Table 8.4 Symmetric payoff matrix

0 1
0 u(0, 0), u(0, 0) u(0, 1), u(1, 0)
1 u(1, 0), u(0, 1) u(1, 1), u(1, 1)

Action 1 is best response for some player exactly if the probability

assigned is at least
$$\begin{aligned} q = \frac{u(0,0)-u(1,0)}{(u(0,0)-u(1,0))+(u(1,1)- (8.4)
u(0,1))} \end{aligned}$$
This changes the payoff matrix to as tabulated in Table 8.5.
Table 8.5 Symmetric payoff matrix parametrized by critical probability q
 0 1
0 q, q 0, 0
1 0, 0 $$1-q,1-q$$

A configuration s is the assignment of actions for each of the players in

the population. Given a configuration s, player x’s best response is to
choose an action which maximises the sum of the payoffs from the
interactions with each of the neighbours. Thus action a is the best response
to configuration s for player x, i.e, $$a \epsilon b(s,x)$$, if Eq. 8.5 is
satisfied.
$$\begin{aligned} \sum \limits _{y \epsilon \Gamma (x)}u(a,s(y)) (8.5)
\ge \sum \limits _{y \epsilon \Gamma (x)}u(1-a,s(y)) \end{aligned}$$
Contagion is said to occur if one action can spread from a finite set of
players to the whole population. There is a contagion threshold such that
the contagion occurs if and only if the payoff parameter q is less than this
contagion threshold. A group of players is said to be p-cohesive if every
member of that group has at least proportion p of the neighbours within the
group. Reference [13] shows that the contagion threshold is the smallest p
such that every “large” group (consisting of all but a finite sets of players)
contains an infinite, ( $$1-p$$)-cohesive, subgroup. Additionally, the
contagion threshold is the largest p such that it is possible to label players so
that, for any player with a sufficiently high label, proportion at least p of the
neighbours has a lower label.
Contagion is most likely to occur if the contagion threshold is close to
its upper bound of $$\frac{1}{2}$$. Reference [13] shows that the
contagion threshold will be close to $$\frac{1}{2}$$ if two properties
hold. First, there is low neighbour growth : the number of players who can
be reached in k steps grows less than exponentially in k. This will occur if
there is a tendency for players’ neighbours’ neighbours to be their own
neighbours. Second, the local interaction system must be sufficiently
uniform, i.e, there is some number $$\alpha $$ such that for all
players a long way from some core group, roughly proportion
$$\alpha $$ of their neighbours are closer to the core group.
Reference [1] deals with a polling game on a directed graph. At round 0,
the vertices of a subset $$W_{0}$$ are coloured white and all the
other vertices are coloured black. At each round, each vertex v is coloured
according to the following rule. If at a round r, the vertex v has has more
than half of its neighbours coloured c, then at round $$r+1$$, the
vertex v will be coloured c. If at round r, the vertex v has the vertex v has
exactly half of its neighbours coloured white and the other half coloured
black, then this is said to be a tie. In this case, v is coloured at round
$$r+1$$ by the same colour it had at round r. If at a finite round r, all
the vertices are white, then $$W_{0}$$ is said to be a dynamic
monopoly or dynamo . The paper proves that for
$$n\in \mathbb {N}$$, there exists a graph with more than n vertices
and with a dynamo of 18 vertices. In general, a dynamo of size O(1) (as a
function of the number of vertices) is sufficient.
Reference [4] performed a study to understand the strength of weak ties
versus the strong ties. They found that the strength of weak ties is that they
tend to be long—they connect socially distant locations. Moreover, only a
few long ties are needed to give large and highly clustered populations the
“degrees of separation” of a random network, in which simple contagions,
like disease or information, can rapidly diffuse. It is tempting to regard this
principle as a lawful regularity, in part because it justifies generalization
from mathematically tractable random graphs to the structured networks
that characterize patterns of social interaction. Nevertheless, our research
cautions against uncritical generalization. Using Watts and Strogatz’s
original model of a small world network, they found that long ties do not
always facilitate the spread of complex contagions and can even preclude
diffusion entirely if nodes have too few common neighbours to provide
multiple sources of confirmation or reinforcement. While networks with
long, narrow bridges are useful for spreading information about an
innovation or social movement, too much randomness can be inefficient for
spreading the social reinforcement necessary to act on that information,
especially as thresholds increase or connectedness declines.
An informational cascade occurs when it is optimal for an individual,
having observed the actions of those ahead of him, to follow the behaviour
of the preceding individual without regard to his own information.
Reference [2] modelled the dynamics of imitative decision processes as
informational cascades and showed that at some stage a decision maker will
ignore his private information and act only on the information obtained
from previous decisions. Once this stage is reached, her decision is
uninformative to others. Therefore, the next individual draws the same
inference from the history of past decisions; thus if her signal is drawn
independently from the same distribution as previous individuals’, this
individual also ignores her own information and takes the same action as
the previous individual. In the absence of external disturbances, so do all
later individuals.
The origin of large but rare cascades that are triggered by small initial
shocks is a phenomenon that manifests itself as diversely as cultural fads,
collective action, the diffusion of norms and innovations, and cascading
failures in infrastructure and organizational networks. Reference [17]
presented a possible explanation of this phenomenon in terms of a sparse,
random network of interacting agents whose decisions are determined by
the actions of their neighbours according to a simple threshold rule. Two
regimes are identified in which the network is susceptible to very large
cascades also called global cascades, that occur very rarely. When cascade
propagation is limited by the connectivity of the network, a power law
distribution of cascade sizes is observed. But when the network is highly
connected, cascade propagation is limited instead by the local stability of
the nodes themselves, and the size distribution of cascades is bimodal,
implying a more extreme kind of instability that is correspondingly harder
to anticipate. In the first regime, where the distribution of network
neighbours is highly skewed, it was found that the most connected nodes
were far more likely than average nodes to trigger cascades, but not in the
second regime. Finally, it was shown that heterogeneity plays an ambiguous
role in determining a system’s stability: increasingly heterogeneous
thresholds make the system more vulnerable to global cascades; but an
increasingly heterogeneous degree distribution makes it less vulnerable.
To understand how social networks affect the spread of behavior, [3]
juxtaposed several hypothesis. One popular hypothesis stated that networks
with many clustered ties and a high degree of separation will be less
effective for behavioural diffusion than networks in which locally
redundant ties are rewired to provide shortcuts across the social space. A
competing hypothesis argued that when behaviours require social
reinforcement, a network with more clustering may be more advantageous,
even if the network as a whole has a larger diameter. To really understand
the phenomenon, the paper investigated the effects of network structure on
diffusion by studying the spread of health behaviour through artificially
structured online communities. Individual adoption was found to be much
more likely when participants received social reinforcement from multiple
neighbours in the social network. The behaviour spread farther and faster
across clustered-lattice networks than across corresponding random
networks.
Reference [5] called the propagation requiring simultaneous exposure to
multiple sources of activation, multiplex propagation . This paper found
that the effect of random links makes the propagation more difficult to
achieve.

8.2 Probabilistic Models of Cascade

These cascades primarily refer to epidemic diseases which are contagious
and pass from one person to another. These epidemics can either spread
through the population at an alarming rate or persist quietly for a long time.
In a manner of speaking, the cascade of diseases is similar to the cascade of
behaviours. Both of these travel from person to person. However, this is
where the similarities end. Behaviour adoption depends on the decision of a
person whether or not to switch to that behaviour. On the other hand, a
person’s decision is moot in the case of the spread of diseases. Only the
susceptibility of a person plays a factor in epidemics.
The spread of diseases from one to another can be visualized through a
contact network . A network where every node is a person and an edge
between people if they come in contact with one another which makes it
possible for disease to spread. Contact networks are used not only to study
the spread of fast-moving diseases in plants and animals but also to track
the spread of malicious software through communication networks.
The pathogen and the network are closely intertwined: for different
diseases affecting the same population, depending on the transmission
medium these diseases may have different rates of spreading. Air-borne
diseases would spread faster and over a larger area, infecting a large
fraction of the population in very little time. Whereas, a disease requiring
some form of physical contact may not spread as fast and may not be able
to infect as many individuals when compared to other forms of
transmission. A similar case exists in the case of malicious software. A
software that can infect any device running a particular operating system,
for example, will spread at a rate faster than one requiring a more specific
form of access, such as being connected to the same network or being at a
certain distance from another infected physical device.
The cascading process in epidemics is more random than that used in
modelling behaviour because in each stage of contact there is a certain
probability associated with whether or not the disease will be spread. To
understand such random behaviour, there exist several models which are
discussed as follows.

../images/462433_1_En_8_Chapter/462433_1_En_8_Fig16_HTML.gif
Fig. 8.16 Contact network for branching process

../images/462433_1_En_8_Chapter/462433_1_En_8_Fig17_HTML.gif
Fig. 8.17 Contact network for branching process where high infection probability leads to
widespread

../images/462433_1_En_8_Chapter/462433_1_En_8_Fig18_HTML.gif
Fig. 8.18 Contact network for branching process where low infection probability leads to the
disappearance of the disease

8.2.1 Branching Process

This is the simplest model which works in the following steps:
First wave: Suppose that a disease carrier enters a population. She will
transmit the disease to every person she meets independently with
probability p. Let’s suppose she met k people. These k individuals form
the first wave of the epidemic and some of them may be infected, while
others may not.
Second wave: Now, each of these k individuals in the first wave meet
with k different people. This results in $$k \cdot k = k^{2}$$ people.
Each individual infected in the first wave infects each person in the
second wave independently with probability p.
Subsequent waves: Further waves are formed in a similar manner where
each person in the preceding wave meets with k different people and
transmits the infection independently with probability p.
The contact network in Fig. 8.16 illustrates the transmission of an
epidemic. In this tree network, the root node represents the disease carrier.
The first wave is represented by this root node’s child nodes. Each of these
child nodes denote the parent nodes for the second wave. The set of nodes
in every subsequent depth depict each wave.
Figure 8.17 depicts a contact network where the probability of infection
is high. This leads the disease to become widespread and multiply at every
level, possibly reaching a level where all nodes are infected. In stark
contrast, Fig. 8.18 signifies a contact network where the probability is low.
This causes the disease to infect fewer and fewer individuals at every level
until it completely vanishes.

8.2.2 Basic Reproductive Number

The basic reproductive number, denoted by $$R_{0}$$, is defined as the
expected number of new cases of the disease caused by a single individual.
In the branching process discussed in Sect. 8.2.1, since each individual
meets k new people and infects each with probability p, the basic
reproductive number is pk.
Let $$q_{n}$$ denote the probability that the epidemic survives
for atleast n waves, i.e, that some individual in the nth level of the tree
becomes infected. Let $$q^{*}$$ be the limit of $$q_{n}$$ as n
goes to infinity. In other words, we can call this term $$q^{*}$$ the
probability of persistence .

8.2.2.1 Expected Number of Infected Individuals in the

Branching Process
The number of individuals at level n of this tree is $$k^{n}$$. Let
$$X_{n}$$ be a random variable equal to the number of infected
individuals at this level n. For each individual at level n, let $$Y_{nj}$$
be a random variable equal to 1 if j is infected, and equal to 0 otherwise.
Then
$$\begin{aligned} X_{n} = Y_{n1} + Y_{n2} + \dots + Y_{nm} (8.6)
\end{aligned}$$
where $$m = k^{n}$$. By linearity of expectation.
$$\begin{aligned} E[X_{n}] = E[Y_{n1} + Y_{n2} + \dots +
Y_{nm}] = E[Y_{n1}] + E[Y_{n2}] + \dots + E[Y_{nm}] (8.7)
\end{aligned}$$
Now,
$$E[Y_{nj}] = 1 \cdot P[Y_{nj}=1] + 0 \cdot P[Y_{nj}=0] =
P[Y_{nj}=1]$$
, i.e, the expectation of each $$Y_{nj}$$ is the probability of that
individual j getting infected.
Individual j at depth n gets infected when each of the n contacts leading
from the root to j successfully transmit the disease. Since each contact
transmits the disease independently with probability p, individual j is
infected with probability $$p^{n}$$. Therefore,
$$E[Y_{nj}] = p^{n}$$. This leads us to conclude that
$$\begin{aligned} E[X_{n}] = p^{n}k^{n} = (pk)^{n} = (8.8)
R_{0}^{n} \end{aligned}$$

8.2.2.2 Formula for $$q_{n}$$

This quantity $$q_{n}$$ depends on three quantities: the number of
contacts per individual k, the contagion probability p, and the level of the
tree n. A direct formula for $$q_{n}$$ is difficult to formulate, but it is
easier to express $$q_{n}$$ in terms of $$q_{n-1}$$.
Let us consider the following situation: Starting from the root node, the
disease spreads through the root’s first contact j and then continues to
transmit down to n levels in the part of the tree reachable through j. For this
to happen, it would first require j to catch the disease from the root, which
will happen with probability p. Once j has contracted the pathogen, j
analogously becomes the root of its tree. Now the disease will persists
through this tree containing $$n-1$$ levels, accessible by j with
probability $$q_{n-1}$$ (by definition of $$q_{n-1}$$). This
means that the situation will occur with probability $$pq_{n-1}$$. In
other words, the situation will fail with probability $$1 - pq_{n-1}$$.
Now, this gives the probability of failure for the disease to persist through
the tree accessible by j. Since, the root node has k contacts in all, each of
these contacts will fail with probability $$1-pq_{n-1}$$. Since
they’re independent, the probability that they all fail is
$$(1-pq_{n-1})^k$$. But this is also $$1-q_{n}$$, since by
definition of $$q_{n}$$, the quantity $$1-q_{n}$$ is exactly
the probability that the disease fails to persist to n levels. Therefore
(8.9)
 $$\begin{aligned} \begin{aligned} 1-q_{n} = (1-pq_{n-1})^k
\implies q_{n} = 1-(1-pq_{n-1})^k \end{aligned} \end{aligned}$$
Since the root is infected, we can take $$q_{0} = 1$$ by considering
that the root is at level 0. From here, we can compute
$$q_{1}, q_{2}, \dots $$. However, this does not tells us the value of
$$q_{n}$$ as n tends to infinity.
Let $$f(x) = 1-(1-px)^k$$. Then, we can write
$$q_{n} = f(q_{n-1})$$. Figure 8.19 shows the plot of f(x) for the
values 1, f(1), f(f(1)), $$\dots $$ obtained by repeated application of f.

../images/462433_1_En_8_Chapter/462433_1_En_8_Fig19_HTML.gif
Fig. 8.19 Repeated application of $$f(x) = 1-(1-px)^{k}$$

The derivative of f is $$f'(x) = pk(1-px)^{k}$$. Now

$$f'(0) = pk = R_{0}$$. From the figure, we can conclude that when
$$R_{0} > 1$$, $$q^{*} > 0$$ and $$q^{*} = 0$$
when $$R_{0} < 1$$.
In summary, if $$R_{0} < 1$$, then with probability 1, the
disease dies out after a finite number of waves, i.e, $$q^{*} = 0$$. If
$$R_{0} > 1$$, then with probability greater than 0 the disease
persists by infecting atleast one person in each wave, i.e,
$$q^{*} > 0$$.
So in situations requiring us to contain an epidemic, we have to either
quarantine individuals, which will reduce k, or take additional measures
such as improving sanitation, which could bring down the value of p.

8.2.3 SIR Epidemic Model

In this epidemic model, each individual goes through the following three
stages during the course of the epidemic:
Susceptible (S): Before the individual has caught the disease, it is
susceptible to infection from its neighbours.
Infected (I): Once the individual has caught the disease, it is infected and
has some probability of infecting each of its susceptible neighbours.
Removed (R): After the individual has experienced the full infectious
period, it is removed from the network because it no longer poses a threat
of future infection.
 The SIR model is defined as follows: Given a directed graph
representing the contact network where an edge between u and v indicates
that if u becomes infected, then the disease could spread to v. Each
individual in this network can go through the Susceptible-Infected-
Removed cycle. To control the progress of the epidemic, the model has the
following two parameters: p is the probability of the spread of infection and
$$t_{I}$$ indicates the length of the infection.
The model progresses in the following manner: Initially, a finite set of
these nodes are in state I while all the others are in state S. Each node v that
is in this state I remains infectious for a fixed number of steps
$$t_{I}$$. During these $$t_{I}$$ time steps, v can infect its
susceptible neighbour with probability p. After $$t_{I}$$ time steps,
the node v moves to state R and can neither infect any other susceptible
node nor get infected by any other node.
However, this model is only applicable for diseases which individuals
can only contract once in their lifetime such as chicken pox, small pox, etc.
The node gets removed from the network because it has gained lifetime
immunity. When dealing with diseases such as cholera, typhoid, jaundice,
etc, which can recur in individuals, such models cannot be used.
Additionally, this model makes the assumption that the probability of an
infection spreading from an infected individual to a susceptible one is
uniform throughout with probability p. This assumption rarely works in the
real-world. The probability of disease spreading depends on the duration
and intensity of contact between an infected and a susceptible individual. To
account for this, we modify the model to have the probability
$$p_{u,v}$$ between node u and v. Higher the probability, greater the
intensity of contact.

8.2.4 SIS Epidemic Model

This is a model which is useful for diseases that can be contracted by
individuals multiple times. In this model, there are only two states:
Susceptible and Infected . There is no Removed state. Instead, an infected
individual returns to the susceptible state once she is done with the
infectious state. The mechanics of the SIS model is similar to the SIR
model except that in the latter model, after $$t_{I}$$ time steps, an
infected node moves to state R, but in the former model, the infected node
moves to state S. Like the SIR model, this model can also have varying
probability of infection.
The SIS model may be considered the same as the SIR model if we
consider that a node u infected at time step t is different from the same node
u infected at time step $$t'$$. A network that represents the same
nodes at different time steps is called a time-expanded network .
The qualitative difference between a SIR model and a SIS model is that
in the former model, the disease kind of “burns” through the network
because nodes once infected move to the removed state after
$$t_{I}$$ time steps and cannot be reinfected. However, in the latter
model, the disease can persist for a very long time infecting an individual
multiple times. The only point when the disease vanishes from the network
by this model, is when no individual possess the pathogen.

8.2.5 SIRS Epidemic Model

Measles and certain sexually transmitted diseases show a certain property
of oscillation, i.e, these diseases confer a temporary period of immunity on
the infected individuals. To accommodate this phenomenon, we build a
model that combines the elements of the SIS and the SIR model. In this
model after $$t_{I}$$ time steps, i.e, after the infected node has
recovered, the node moves to the R state for $$t_{R}$$ time steps. After
$$t_{R}$$ time steps, the node returns to the S state.

8.2.6 Transient Contact Network

There are certain other diseases such as HIV/AIDS which progress over
many years, and its course is heavily dependent on the contact network.
There is a possibility of multiple contacts at a certain period of time which
can affect the progression of the disease. Additionally, these contacts so not
necessarily last through the whole course of the epidemic, thereby making
the contact transient. To keep track of this transience, we will associate with
every edge in this contact network the time period during which it was
possible for the disease to have been transmitted from one node to the other.
Figure 8.20 illustrates a transient network where the time period of contact
is associate with each edge.

../images/462433_1_En_8_Chapter/462433_1_En_8_Fig20_HTML.gif
Fig. 8.20 A contact network where each edge has an associated period of time denoting the time of
contact between the connected vertices

8.2.6.1 Concurrency
In certain situations it is not just the timing of the contacts that matter but
the pattern of timing also which can influence the severity of the epidemic.
A timing pattern of particular interest is concurrency. A person is involved
in concurrent partnerships if she has multiple active partnerships that
overlap in time. These concurrent patterns cause the disease to circulate
more vigorously through the network and enable any node with the disease
to spread it to any other.
Reference [7] proposed a model which when given as input the social
network graph with the edges labelled with probabilities of influence
between users could predict the time by which a user may be expected to
perform an action.

8.3 Cascading in Twitter

Reference [16] analysed the ways in which hashtags spread on the network
of Twitter users. The network contains a directed edge from user u to user v
if u includes “@v” in atleast t tweets for some threshold t. The neighbour
set of a user u is the the set of other users to whom u has an edge. As users
in u’s neighbour set each mentioned a given hashtag H in a tweet for the
first time, this paper looked at the probability that u would first mention it
as well. Looking at all the users u who have not yet mentioned H, but for
whom k neighbors have; p(k) is defined to be the fraction of such users who
mentioned H before a $$(k + 1)$$st neighbour did so. In other words,
p(k) is the fraction of users who adopt the hashtag directly after their kth
exposure to it, given that they hadn’t yet adopted it. Figure 8.21 shows a
plot of p(k) as a function of k for the 500 most mentioned hashtags in the
dataset. Such a curve is called an exposure or influence curve. It can be
observed that the curve peaks relatively early on and then declines.

../images/462433_1_En_8_Chapter/462433_1_En_8_Fig21_HTML.gif
Fig. 8.21 Exposure curve for top 500 hashtags
 Stickiness is defined as the probability that a piece of information will
pass from a person who knows or mentions it to a person who is exposed to
it. It is computed as the maximum value of p(k). Persistence is defined as
the relative extent to which repeated exposures to a piece of information
continue to have significant marginal effects on its adoption.
To understand how these exposure curves vary across different kinds of
hashtags, the 500 most-mentioned hashtags were classified according to
their topic. Then the curves p(k) were averaged separately within each
category and their shapes were compared. Many of the categories had p(k)
curves that did not differ significantly in shape from the average, but
unusual shapes for several important categories were found. First, for
political hashtags, the persistence had a significantly larger value than the
average - in other words, successive exposures to a political hashtag had an
unusually large effect relative to the peak. In contrast, Twitter idiom hastags
- a kind of hashtag that will be familiar to Twitter users in which common
English words are concatenated together to serve as a marker for a
conversational theme (e.g. #cantlivewithout, #dontyouhate, #iloveitwhen,
and many others, including concatenated markers for weekly Twitter events
such as #musicmonday and #followfriday). In such cases, the stickiness was
high, but the persistence was unusually low; if a user didn’t adopt an idiom
after a small number of exposures, the marginal chance they did so later fell
off quickly.
Next, the paper looks at the overall structure of interconnections among
the initial adopters of a hashtag. For this, the first m individuals to mention
a particular hashtag H were taken, and the structure of the subgraph
$$G_{m}$$ induced on these first m mentioners were studied. In this
structural context, it was found that political hashtags exhibited distinctive
features - in particular, the subgraphs $$G_{m}$$ for political
hashtags H tended to exhibit higher internal degree, a greater density of
triangles, and a large of number of nodes not in $$G_{m}$$ who had
significant number of neighbors in it.
In the real-world there are multiple pieces of information spreading
through the network simultaneously. These pieces of information do not
spread in isolation, independent of all other information currently diffusing
in the network. These pieces sometimes cooperate while in other times
compete with one another. Reference [14] explains a statistical model that
allows for this competition as well as cooperation of different contagions in
information diffusion. Competing contagions decrease each other’s
probability of spreading, while cooperating contagions help each other in
being adopted throughout the network. It was observed that the sequence in
which the contagions were exposed to a person played a role in the effect of
a particular contagion X. Thus all possible sequences of contagions have to
be considered. This model was evaluated on 18, 000 contagions
simultaneously spreading through the Twitter network. It learnt how
different contagions interact with each other and then uses these interactions
to more accurately predict the diffusion of a contagion through the network.
The following summary for the effects of contagions was learnt:
A user is exposed to a certain contagion $$u_{1}$$. Whether or not
she retweets it, this contagion influences her.
This user is next exposed to another contagion $$u_{2}$$. If
$$u_{2}$$ is more infectious than $$u_{1}$$, the user shifts focus
from $$u_{1}$$ to $$u_{2}$$.
On the other hand, if $$u_{2}$$ is less infectious than $$u_{1}$$,
then the user will still be influenced by $$u_{1}$$ instead of switching
to $$u_{2}$$. However, one of two things can happen:
– If $$u_{2}$$ is highly related to $$u_{1}$$ in content, then the
user will be more receptive of $$u_{2}$$ and this will increase the
infection probability of $$u_{2}$$.
– If $$u_{2}$$ is unrelated to $$u_{1}$$, then the user is less
receptive of $$u_{2}$$ and the infection probability is decreased.
Moreover, the model also provided a compelling hypothesis for the
principles that govern content interaction in information diffusion. It was
found that contagions have an adversely negative (suppressive) effect on
less infectious contagions that are of unrelated content or subject matter,
while at the same time they can dramatically increase the infection
probability of contagions that are less infectious but are highly related in
subject matter. These interactions caused a relative change in the spreading
probability of a contagion by $$71\%$$ on the average. This model
provides ways in which promotion content could strategically be placed to
encourage its adoption, and also ways to suppress previously exposed
contagions (such as in the case of fake news).
Information reaches people not only through ties in online networks but
also through offline networks. Reference [15] devised such a model where a
node can receive information through both offline as well as online
connections. Using the Twitter data in [14], they studied how information
reached the nodes of the network. It was discovered that the information
tended to “jump” across the network, which could only be explained as an
effect of an unobservable external influence on the network. Additionally, it
was found that only about $$71\%$$ of the information volume in
Twitter could be attributed to network diffusion, and the remaining
$$29\%$$ was due to external events and factors outside the network.
Cascades in Recommendations
Reference [11] studied information cascades in the context of
recommendations, and in particular studied the patterns of cascading
recommendations that arise in large social networks. A large person-to-
person recommendation network from a online retailer consisting of four
million people who made sixteen million recommendations on half a
million products were investigated. During the period covered by the
dataset, each time a person purchased a book, DVD, video, or music
product, she was given the option of sending an e-mail message
recommending the item to friends. The first recipient to purchase the item
received a discount, and the sender received a referral credit with monetary
value. A person could make recommendations on a product only after
purchasing it. Since each sender had an incentive for making effective
referrals, it is natural to hypothesize that this dataset is a good source of
cascades. Such a dataset allowed the discovery of novel patterns: the
distribution of cascade sizes is approximately heavy-tailed; cascades tend to
be shallow, but occasional large bursts of propagation can occur. The
cascade sub-patterns revealed mostly small tree-like subgraphs; however
differences in connectivity, density, and the shape of cascades across
product types were observed. It was observed that the frequency of different
cascade subgraphs was not a simple consequence of differences in size or
density; rather, there were instances where denser subgraphs were more
frequent than sparser ones, in a manner suggestive of properties in the
underlying social network and recommendation process. The relative
abundance of different cascade subgraphs suggested subtle properties of the
underlying social network and recommendation process.
Reference [10] analysed blog information to find out how blogs behave
and how information propagates through the Blogspace , the space of all
blogs. There findings are summarized as follows: The decline of a post’s
popularity was found to follow a power law with slope
$$\approx -1.5$$. The size of the cascades, size of blogs, in-degrees
and out-degrees all follow a power law. Stars and chains were the basic
components of cascades, with stars being more common. A SIS model was
found to generate cascades that match very well the real cascades with
respect to in-degree distribution and cascade size distribution.
Reference [6] developed a generative model that is able to produce the
temporal characteristics of the Blogspace. This model
$$\mathbb {ZC}$$ used a ‘zero-crossing’ approach based on a
random walk, combined with exploration and exploitation.
Reference [12] analysed a large network of mass media and blog posts
to determine how sentiment features of a post affect the sentiment of
connected posts and the structure of the network itself. The experiments
were conducted on a graph containing nearly 8 million nodes and 15
million edges. They found that (i) the nodes are not only influenced by their
immediate neighbours but also by its position within a cascade and that
cascade’s characteristics., (ii) deep cascades lead complex but predictable
lives, (iii) shallow cascades tend to be objective, and (iv) sentiment
becomes more polarized as depth increases.

Problems
Generate the following two graphs with random seed of 10:

50 An Erdös-Rényi undirected random graph with 10000 nodes and

100000 edges.

51 A preferential attachment graph with 10000 nodes with out-degree 10.

Let the nodes in each of these graphs have IDs ranging from 0 to 9999.
Assume that the graphs represent the political climate of an upcoming
election between yourself and a rival with a total of 10000 voters. If most of
the voters have already made up their mind: $$40\%$$ will vote for
you, $$40\%$$ for your rival, and the remaining $$20\%$$ are
undecided. Let us say that each voter’s support is determined by the last
digit of their node ID. If the last digit is 0, 2, 4 or 6, the node supports you.
If the last digit is 1, 3, 5 or 7, the node supports your rival. And if the last
digit is 8 or 9, the node is undecided.
Assume that the loyalties of the ones that have already made up their
minds are steadfast. There are 10 days to the election and the undecided
voters will choose their candidate in the following manner:
1.
In each iteration, every undecided voter decides on a candidate. Voters
are processed in increasing order of node ID. For every undecided
voter, if the majority of their friends support you, they now support
you. If the majority of their friends support your rival, they now
support your rival.
2.
If a voter has equal number of friends supporting you and your rival,
support is assigned in an alternating fashion, starting from yourself. In
other words, the first tie leads to support for you, the second tie leads to
support for your rival, the third for you, the fourth for your rival, and so
on.
3.
When processing the updates, the values from the current iteration are
used.
4.
There are 10 iterations of the process described above. One happening
on each day.
5.
The 11th day is the election day, and the votes are counted.

52 Perform these configurations and iterations, and compute who wins in

the first graph, and by how much? Similarly, compute the votes for the
second graph.

Let us say that you have a total funding of Rs. 9000, and you have decided
to spend this money by hosting a live stream. Unfortunately, only the voters
with IDs 3000–3099. However, your stream is so persuasive that any voter
who sees it will immediately decide to vote for you, regardless of whether
they had decided to vote for yourself, your rival, or where undecided. If it
costs Rs. 1000 to reach 10 voters in sequential order, i.e, the first Rs. 1000
reaches voters 3000–3009, the second Rs. 1000 reaches voters 3010–3019,
and so on. In other words, the total of Rs. k reaches voters with IDs from
3000 to $$3000 + k/100 - 1$$. The live stream happens before the 10 day
period, and the persuaded voters never change their mind.

53 Simulate the effect of spending on the two graphs. First, read in the
two graphs again and assign the initial configurations as before. Now,
before the decision process, you purchase Rs. k of ads and go through the
decision process of counting votes.
For each of the two social graphs, plot Rs. k (the amount you spend) on
the x-axis (for values k = ) and the number of votes
you win by on the y-axis (that is, the number of votes for youself less the
number of votes for your rival). Put these on the same plot. What is the
minimum amount you can spend to win the election in each of these
graphs?

Instead of general campaigning, you decide to target your campaign. Let’s

say you have a posh Rs. 1000 per plate event for the high rollers among
your voters (the people with the highest degree). You invite high rollers in
decreasing order of their degree, and your event is so spectacular that any
one who comes to your event is instantly persuaded to vote for you
regardless of their previous decision. This event happens before the
decision period. When there are ties between voters of the same degree, the
high roller with lowest node ID gets chosen first.

54 Simulate the effect of the high roller dinner on the two graphs. First,
read in the graphs and assign the initial configuration as before. Now,
before the decision process, you spend Rs. k on the fancy dinner and then
go through the decision process of counting votes.
For each of the two social graphs, plot Rs. k (the amount you spend) on
the x-axis (for values ) and the number of votes
you win by on the y-axis (that is, the number of votes for yourself less the
number of votes for your rival). What is the minimum amount you can
spend to win the election in each of the two social graphs?

Assume that a mob has to choose between two behaviours, riot or not.
However, this behaviour depends on a threshold which varies from one
individual to another, i.e, an individual i has a threshold that determines
whether or not to participate. If there are atleast individuals rioting, then i
will also participate, otherwise i will refrain from the behaviour.
Assuming that each individual has full knowledge of the behaviour of
all the other nodes in the network. In order to explore the impact of
thresholds on the final number of rioters, for a mob of n individuals, the
histogram of thresholds is defined, where
expresses the number of individuals that have threshold . For
example, $$N_{0}$$ is the number of people who riot no matter
what, $$N_{1}$$ is the number of people who will riot if one person
is rioting, and so on.
Let T = [1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 4, 1, 0, 4, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 0, 0, 0, 1, 0, 4, 0, 1, 4,
0, 1, 1, 1, 4, 0, 1, 1, 1, 1, 0, 0, 0, 0, 1, 1, 0, 0, 1, 0, 0, 0, 0, 1, 1, 0, 0, 4, 1, 1,
4. 1, 4, 0, 1, 0, 1, 1, 1, 0, 4, 0, 1, 0, 1, 0, 0, 0, 1, 0, 1, 1, 1, 0, 1, 0, 0, 0, 1, 1,
1, 1, 1, 0, 4, 0, 4, 0, 0, 1, 1, 1, 4, 0, 4, 0] be the vector of thresholds of 101
rioters.

55 For this threshold vector, compute the histogram N.

56 Using the N calculated in Problem 55, compute its cumulative

histogram $$[N] = (N_{[1]}, \dots , N_{[n-1]})$$, where
$$N_{[k]} = \sum _{l=0}^{k}N_{l}$$. Plot the cumulative histogram
and report the final number of rioters.

References
1. Berger, Eli. 2001. Dynamic monopolies of constant size. Journal of Combinatorial Theory,
Series B 83 (2): 191–200.
[MathSciNet][Crossref]

2. Bikhchandani, Sushil, David Hirshleifer, and Ivo Welch. 1992. A theory of fads, fashion,
custom, and cultural change as informational cascades. Journal of Political Economy 100 (5):
992–1026.
[Crossref]

3. Centola, Damon. 2010. The spread of behavior in an online social network experiment. Science
329 (5996): 1194–1197.
[Crossref]
4.
Centola, Damon, and Michael Macy. 2007. Complex contagions and the weakness of long ties.
 American Journal of Sociology 113 (3): 702–734.
[Crossref]

5. Centola, Damon, Víctor M. Eguíluz, and Michael W. Macy. 2007. Cascade dynamics of complex
propagation. Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and its Applications 374 (1): 449–456.
[Crossref]

6. Goetz, Michaela, Jure Leskovec, Mary McGlohon, and Christos Faloutsos. 2009. Modeling blog
dynamics. In ICWSM.

7. Goyal, Amit, Francesco Bonchi, and Laks V.S. Lakshmanan. 2010. Learning influence
probabilities in social networks. In Proceedings of the third ACM international conference on
Web search and data mining, 241–250. ACM.

8. Granovetter, Mark. 1978. Threshold models of collective behavior. American Journal of

Sociology 83 (6): 1420–1443.
[Crossref]

9. Immorlica, Nicole, Jon Kleinberg, Mohammad Mahdian, and Tom Wexler. 2007. The role of
compatibility in the diffusion of technologies through social networks. In Proceedings of the 8th
ACM conference on Electronic commerce, 75–83. ACM.

10. Leskovec, Jure, Mary McGlohon, Christos Faloutsos, Natalie Glance, and Matthew Hurst. 2007.
Patterns of cascading behavior in large blog graphs. In Proceedings of the 2007 SIAM
international conference on data mining, 551–556. SIAM

11. Leskovec, Jure, Ajit Singh, and Jon Kleinberg. 2006. Patterns of influence in a recommendation
network. In Pacific-Asia conference on knowledge discovery and data mining, 380–389. Berlin:
Springer.

12. Miller, Mahalia, Conal Sathi, Daniel Wiesenthal, Jure Leskovec, and Christopher Potts. 2011.
Sentiment flow through hyperlink networks. In ICWSM.

13. Morris, Stephen. 2000. Contagion. The Review of Economic Studies 67 (1): 57–78.
[MathSciNet][Crossref]

14. Myers, Seth A., and Jure Leskovec. 2012. Clash of the contagions: Cooperation and competition
in information diffusion. In 2012 IEEE 12th international conference on data mining (ICDM),
539–548. IEEE.

15. Myers, Seth A., Chenguang Zhu, and Jure Leskovec. 2012. Information diffusion and external
influence in networks. In Proceedings of the 18th ACM SIGKDD international conference on
Knowledge discovery and data mining, 33–41. ACM.

16. Romero, Daniel M., Brendan Meeder, and Jon Kleinberg. 2011. Differences in the mechanics of
information diffusion across topics: idioms, political hashtags, and complex contagion on twitter.
In Proceedings of the 20th international conference on World wide web, 695–704. ACM.

17. Watts, Duncan J. 2002. A simple model of global cascades on random networks. Proceedings of
the National Academy of Sciences 99 (9): 5766–5771.
[MathSciNet][Crossref]
© Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2018
Krishna Raj P.M., Ankith Mohan and K.G. Srinivasa, Practical Social Network Analysis with Python,
Computer Communications and Networks
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-96746-2_9

9. Influence Maximisation
Krishna Raj P. M.1 , Ankith Mohan1 and K. G. Srinivasa2

(1) Department of ISE, Ramaiah Institute of Technology, Bangalore,

Karnataka, India
(2) Department of Information Technology, C.B.P. Government
Engineering College, Jaffarpur, Delhi, India

Krishna Raj P. M.
Email: krishnarajpm@gmail.com

The influence maximization problem is a long running problem with

significant amount of literature dedicated to solving this problem. Given a
directed social network with influence weights on edges and a number k,
find k seed nodes such that activating them leads to the maximum expected
number of activated nodes, according to a propagation model. In this
chapter, we learn that this problem is a NP-hard problem with an
approximation giving at best a optimal solution.

9.1 Viral Marketing

Marketing is one of the crucial aspects of an organisation because this
department is tasked with determining which potential customers to market
to. The traditional idea was that if the expected profits from the customer
were greater than the cost of marketing to her, then this customer was
marketed to. The limitation of this idea is that it believes each customer’s
decision to be independent of others. However, this is rarely the case. In
reality, each customer’s decision is based on friends, acquaintances and
other buyers. Taking this into account, each customer has two kinds of
values. (i) Intrinsic value from the profits that can be obtained from a
customer, (ii) Network value from the profits that can be obtained from her
influences, each of their influences, and so on. So if the marketing costs
exceed the expected profits from the customer’s intrinsic value but can be
more than paid up for from her network value, then it is worth marketing to
this customer. This marketing strategy that taps on the network value of
customers and thereby inexpensively promoting a product by marketing
primarily to those with the strongest influence in the market is called viral
marketing . This dependency of one’s decision on that of the people she’s
connected to makes viral marketing potentially more profitable than direct
marketing.
Reference [4] sought to answer the following question: Suppose that we
have data on a social network, with estimates for the extent to which
individuals influence one another, and we would like to market a new
product that we hope will be adopted by a large fraction of the network. If
we can initially targeting a few “influential” members of the network using
incentives, we can trigger a cascade of influence by which friends will
recommend the product to other friends, and many individuals will
ultimately try it. But how should we choose the few key individuals to use
for seeding this process? In the search for the solution, a model was
developed to compute each customer’s probability of buying a product as a
function of both the intrinsic value and the network value to optimize the
choice of customers to market to, as well as estimating the optimum
customer acquisition cost. The framework was applied to marketing movies
using the publicly available EachMovie database of 2.8 million movie
ratings. Reference [12] later modified this work and applied the framework
to study the Epinions social network application.
Let us say that be the set of n potential customers,
be a boolean variable that takes the value 1 if customer i buys the
marketed product and 0 otherwise, and be
the neighbours of each of whom can directly influence . Let the
product be described by a set of attributes . Let be a
variable representing the marketing action that is taken by customer i, i.e,
either could be 1 if customer i was offered a discount and 0 if not, or
could be a continuous variable indicating the amount of discount
offered, or a nominal variable indicating which of the several possible
actions was taken.
Let represent the marketing plan containing the
marketing actions for each of the n potential customers.

(9.1)

where is ’s internal probability of purchasing the marketed

product. is the effect that ’s neighbours have on him.
measures how self-reliant is.

(9.2)

where represents how much customer i is influenced by her neighbour

j, with and . if .

Combining Eqs. 9.1 and 9.2, we get

(9.3)

For calculating the optimal marketing plan for a product that has not yet
been introduced to the market, we compute

(9.4)
where is the set of all possible configurations of and hence is

a set of neighbour state assignments.

Substituting Eq. 9.4 in Eq. 9.3, we get

(9.5)

where is the value of specified by . is

independent of , so the first term simplifies to it. The summation order

in the second term is swapped, and it is zero whenever is zero. This

leads to

(9.6)

The goal is to find the marketing plan that maximises profit. Assume that M
is a boolean vector, c is the cost of marketing to a customer, is the
revenue from selling to the customer if no marketing action is performed,
and is the revenue if marketing is performed. and is the same
unless marketing action includes offering a discount. Let be the

result of setting to 1 and leaving the rest of M unchanged, and similarly

for . The expected lift in profit from marketing to customer i in

isolation is then
(9.7)
This equation gives the intrinsic value of the customer. Let be the null
vector. The global lift in profit that results from a particular choice M of
customers to market to is then

(9.8)

where if , if , and |M| is the number of ones

in M. The total value of a customer is computed as
. The network value is the difference

between her total and intrinsic values.

Let be a marketing action where when no marketing
action is performed. Let c(z) be the cost of performing the action and r(z) be
the revenue obtained if the product is purchased. Let be the result of
setting to z and leaving the rest of M unchanged. The expected lift in
profit from performing marketing action z on customer i in isolation is then

(9.9)

The global lift in profit is

(9.10)
To find the optimal M that maximises ELP, we must try all possible
combinations of assignments to its components. However, this is
intractable, [4] proposes the following approximate procedures:
Single pass : For each i, set if and set

otherwise.
Greedy search : Set . Loop through the ’s setting each to
1 if . Continue looping until there are no

changes in a complete scan of the ’s.

Hill climbing search : Set . Set where
. Now, set where

. Repeat until there is no i for which

setting increases ELP.

The effect that marketing to a person has on the rest of the network is
independent of the marketing actions to other customers. From a customer’s
network effect, we can directly compute whether he is worth marketing to.
Let the be the network effect of customer i for a product with
attributes Y. It is defined as the total increase in probability of purchasing in
the network (including ) that results from a unit change in :

(9.11)

Since is the same for any M, we define it for . Reference

[4] calculates as
(9.12)
 is initially set to 1 for all i, then recursively re-calculated using
Eq. 9.12 until convergence. is defined to be the immediate
change in customer i’s probability of purchasing when he is marketed to
with marketing action z:

(9.13)

From Eq. 9.11, and given that varies linearly with

, the change in the probability of purchasing across the
entire network is then

(9.14)

So the total lift in profit becomes

(9.15)

This approximation is exact when r(z) is constant, which is the case in any
marketing scenario that is advertising-based. When this is the case, the
equation simplifies to:
(9.16)
With Eq. 9.16, we can directly estimate customer i’s lift in profit for any
marketing action z. To find the z that maximises the lift in profit, we take
the derivative with respect to z and set it equal to zero, resulting in:
$$\begin{aligned} \begin{aligned} r \Delta _{i}(Y)\frac{d\Delta (9.17)
P_{i}(z,Y)}{dz} = \frac{dc(z)}{dz} \end{aligned} \end{aligned}$$
Assume $$\Delta P_{i}(z,Y)$$ is differentiable, this allows us to
directly calculate the z which maximises
$$ELP_{i,total}^{z}(Y,M)$$ which is the optimal value for
$$M_{i}$$ in the M that maximizes ELP(Y, M). Hence, from the
customers network effects, $$\Delta _{i}(Y)$$, we can directly
calculate the optimal marketing plan.
Collaborative filtering systems were used to identify the items to
recommend to customers. In these systems, users rate a set of items, and
these ratings are used to recommend other items that the user might be
interested in. The quantitative collaborative filtering algorithm proposed in
[11] was used in this study. The algorithm predicts a user’s rating of an item
as the weighted average of the ratings given by similar users, and
recommends these items with high predicted ratings.
These methodologies were applied on the problem of marketing movies
using the EachMovie collaboration filtering database. EachMovie contains
2.8 million ratings of 1628 movies by 72916 users between 1996 and 1997
by the eponymous recommendation site. EachMovie consists of three
databases: one contains the ratings (on a scale of zero to five), one contains
the demographic information, and one containing information about the
movies. The methods with certain modifications were applied to the
Epinions dataset.
In summary, the goal is to market to a good customer. Although in a
general sense, the definition of good is a subjective one, this paper uses the
following operating definitions. A good customer is one who satisfies the
following conditions: (i) Likely to give the product a high rating, (ii) Has a
strong weight in determining the rating prediction for many of her
neighbours, (iii) Has many neighbours who are easily influenced by the
rating prediction they receive, (iv) Will have high probability of purchasing
the product, and thus will be likely to actually submit a rating that will
affect her neighbours, (v) has many neighbours with the aforementioned
four characteristics, (vi) will enjoy the marketed movie, (vii) has many
close friends, (viii) these close friends are easily swayed, (ix) the friends
will very likely see this movie, and (x) has friends whose friends have these
properties.

9.2 Approximation Algorithm for Influential

Identification
Reference [8] found that the optimization problem of selecting the most
influential nodes is NP-hard. The paper instead proposes an approximation
algorithm. Using an analysis framework based on submodular functions, the
paper showed that a natural greedy strategy obtains a solution that is
provably within $$63\%$$ of optimal for several classes of models.
Consider a directed graph G which represents a social network. Each
node is either active or inactive depending on whether or not this node is an
adopter of an innovation or product. We will look at how the node
progresses from being inactive to active. The switch in the other direction
can be made easily. Roughly, a node v is initially inactive. As time unfolds,
more and more of v’s neighbours become active. At some point, this may
cause v to become active, and this decision may in turn trigger further
decisions by nodes to which v is connected.
Here, the linear threshold model is used to look at the cascading
process. A node v is influenced by each neighbour w according to a weight
$$b_{v,w}$$ such that
$$\sum \limits _{w\ neighbour\ of\ v}b_{v,w} \le 1$$. Each node v
chooses a threshold $$\theta _{v}$$ uniformly at random from the
interval [0, 1] which represents the weighted fraction of v’s neighbours that
must become active in order for v to become active. Given a random choice
of thresholds, and an initial set of active nodes $$A_{0}$$ with all
other nodes inactive, the diffusion process unfolds deterministically in
discrete steps. In step t, all nodes that were active in step $$t-1$$
remain active, and we activate any node v for which the total weight of its
active neighbours is atleast $$\theta _{v}$$, such that
(9.18)
 $$\begin{aligned} \sum \limits _{w\ active\ neighbour\ of\
v}b_{v,w} \ge \theta _{v} \end{aligned}$$
Additionally, the independent cascade model is also considered sometimes.
This model also starts with an initial active set of nodes $$A_{0}$$,
and the process unfolds in discrete steps according to the following
randomized rule. When node v first becomes active in step t, it is given a
single chance to activate each currently inactive neighbour w. It succeeds
with probability $$p_{v,w}$$. If v succeeds, then w will become
active in step $$t+1$$. Whether or not v succeeds, it cannot make any
further attempts to activate w in subsequent rounds. This process runs until
no more activations are possible.
We define the influence of a set of nodes A, denoted by
$$\sigma (A)$$, as the expected number of active nodes at the end of
the process. We need to find for a given value of k, a k-node set of
maximum influence. It is NP-hard to determine the optimum for influence
maximisation and an approximation can be done to a factor of
$$(1-\frac{1}{e}-\epsilon )$$ where e is the base of the natural
logarithm and $$\epsilon $$ is any positive real number. This gives a
performance guarantee of approximately $$63\%$$. The algorithm
that achieves this performance guarantee is a natural greedy hill-climbing
strategy. Additionally, the paper shows that this approximation algorithm
can be applied to the models proposed in [4, 12].
Consider a function $$f(\cdot )$$ that maps subsets of a finite
ground set U to non-negative real numbers. f is said to be submodular if it
satisfies a natural self-diminishing property: the marginal gain from adding
an element to a set S is atleast as high as the marginal gain from adding the
same element to a superset of S. Formally, a submodular function satisfies
Eq. 9.19.
$$\begin{aligned} f(S \cup \{v\})-f(S) \ge f(T \cup \{v\})-f(T) (9.19)
\end{aligned}$$
for all elements v and all pairs of sets $$S \subseteq T$$. There is one
particular property of submodular functions that is of specific interest to the
paper.

Theorem 12 For a non-negative integer, monotone submodular function f,

let S be a set of size k obtained by selecting elements one at a time, each
time choosing an element that provides the largest marginal increase in the
function value. Let $$S^{*}$$ be a set that maximises the value of f over
all k-element sets. Then $$f(S) \ge (1-\frac{1}{e})\cdot f(S^{*})$$, i.e, S
provides a $$(1-\frac{1}{e})$$-approximation.

This property can be extended to show that for any $$\epsilon > 0$$,
there is a $$\gamma > 0$$ such that by using $$(1+\gamma )$$-
approximate values for the function to be optimized, a
$$(1-\frac{1}{e}-\epsilon )$$-approximation.
Further it is assumed that each node v has an associated non-negative
weight $$w_{v}$$ which tells us how important it is that v be
activated in the final outcome. If B denotes the set activated by the process
with initial activation A, then the weighted influence function
$$\sigma _{w}(A)$$ is defined to be the expected value over
outcomes B of the quantity $$\sum \limits _{v \in B}w_{v}$$.
The paper proves the following theorems:

Theorem 13 For an arbitrary instance of the independent cascade

model, the resulting influence function $$\sigma (\cdot )$$ is
submodular.

Theorem 14 For an arbitrary instance of the linear threshold model,

the resulting influence function $$\sigma (\cdot )$$ is submodular.

Theorem 15 A node x ends up active if and only if there is a path

from some node in A to x consisting of live edges.

Theorem 16
For a given targeted set A, the following two distributions over sets of
nodes are the same:
1.
The distribution over active sets obtained by running the linear
threshold model to completion starting from A.
2.
The distribution over sets reachable from A via live-edge paths,
under the random selection of live edges defined above.

Theorem 17 The influence maximization problem is NP-hard for

the independent cascade model.
 Theorem 18 The influence maximization problem is NP-hard for
the linear threshold model.
This approximation algorithm was tested on the collaboration graph
obtained from co-authorships in the high-energy physics theory section of
the e-print arXiv publications. This collaboration graph contains a node for
each researcher who has atleast one paper with co-author(s) in the arXiv
database. For each paper with two or more authors, an edge was inserted for
each pair of authors (single-author papers were ignored). The resulting
graph had 10748 nodes, and edges between about 53000 pairs of nodes.
The algorithm was compared in three different models of influence. In
the linear threshold model, if nodes u and v have $$c_{u,v}$$ parallel
edges between them, and degrees $$d_{u}$$ and $$d_{v}$$,
the edge (u, v) was assigned the weight $$\frac{c_{u,v}}{d_{v}}$$
and the edge (v, u) is given the weight $$\frac{c_{u,v}}{d_{u}}$$. In
the independent cascade model, a uniform probability of p was assigned to
each edge, choosing 1 and $$10\%$$ in separate trials. If nodes u and
v have $$c_{u,v}$$ edges, u has a chance of p to activate v, i.e, u has
total probability of $$1-(1-p)^{c_{u,v}}$$ of activating v once it
becomes active. A special case of the independent cascade model termed as
“weighted cascade” was studied wherein each edge from node u to v was
assigned probability $$\frac{1}{d_{v}}$$ of activating v.
The greedy algorithm was compared with heuristics based on degree
centrality, distance centrality and a crude baseline of choosing random
nodes to target. The degree centrality involves choosing nodes in order of
decreasing degrees, the distance centrality chooses nodes in order of
increasing average distance to other nodes in the network.
For computing $$\sigma (A)$$, the process was simulated 10000
times for each targeted set, re-choosing thresholds or edge outcomes
pseudo-randomly from [0, 1] every time.
Figures 9.1, 9.2, 9.3, 9.4 show the performance of the algorithms in the
linear model, weight cascade model, independent cascade model with
probabilities 1 and $$10\%$$ respectively. It is observed that the
greedy algorithm clearly surpasses the other heuristics.

../images/462433_1_En_9_Chapter/462433_1_En_9_Fig1_HTML.gif
Fig. 9.1 Results for the linear threshold model
 ../images/462433_1_En_9_Chapter/462433_1_En_9_Fig2_HTML.gif
Fig. 9.2 Results for the weight cascade model

../images/462433_1_En_9_Chapter/462433_1_En_9_Fig3_HTML.gif
Fig. 9.3 Results for the independent cascade model with probability $$1\%$$

../images/462433_1_En_9_Chapter/462433_1_En_9_Fig4_HTML.gif
Fig. 9.4 Results for the independent cascade model with probability $$10\%$$

From these results, the paper proposes a broader framework that

generalizes these models. The general threshold model is proposed. A node
v’s decision to become active can be based on an arbitrary monotone
function of the set of neighbours of v that are already active. Thus,
associated with v is a monotone threshold function $$f_{v}$$ that
maps subsets of v’s neighbour set to real numbers in [0, 1], subject to the
condition that $$f_{v}(\phi ) = 0$$. Each node v initially chooses
$$\theta _{v}$$ uniformly at random from the interval [0, 1]. Now,
however, v becomes active in step t if $$f_{v}(S) \ge \theta _{v}$$ ,
where S is the set of neighbours of v that are active in step $$t - 1$$.
Thus, the linear threshold model is a special case of this general threshold
model in which each threshold function has the form
$$f_{v}(S) = \sum \limits _{u \in S}b_{v,u}$$ for parameters
$$b_{v,u}$$ such that
$$\sum \limits _{u\ neighbour\ of\ v}b_{v,u} \le 1$$.
The independent cascade model is generalized to allow the probability
that u succeeds in activating a neighbour v to depend on the set of v’s
neighbours that have already tried. This uses an incremental function
$$p_{v}(u,S) \in [0,1]$$ , where S and u are disjoint subsets of v’s
neighbour set. A general cascade process works by analogy with the
independent case: in the general case, when u attempts to activate v, it
succeeds with probability $$p_{v}(u, S)$$, where S is the set of
neighbours that have already tried (and failed) to activate v. The
independent cascade model is the special case where $$p_{v}(u, S)$$
is a constant $$p_{u,v}$$, independent of S. The cascade models of
interest are only those defined by incremental functions that are order-
independent in the following sense: if neighbours $$u_{1}$$,
 $$u_{2}$$, $$\ldots $$, $$u_{l}$$ try to activate v, then
the probability that v is activated at the end of these l attempts does not
depend on the order in which the attempts are made.
These two models are equivalent and there is a way to convert between
them. First, consider an instance of the general threshold model with
threshold functions $$f_{v}$$ . To define an equivalent cascade
model, we need to understand the probability that an additional neighbour u
can activate v, given that the nodes in a set S have already tried and failed.
If the nodes in S have failed, then node v’s threshold $$\theta _{v}$$
must be in the range $$\theta _{v} \in (f_{v}(S),1]$$. However,
subject to this constraint, it is uniformly distributed. Thus, the probability
that a neighbour $$u \notin S$$ succeeds in activating v, given that
the nodes in S have failed, is as given in Eq. 9.20.
$$\begin{aligned} p_{v}(u,S) = \frac{f_{v}(S \cup \{u\}) - f_{v} (9.20)
(S)}{1 - f_{v}(S)} \end{aligned}$$
So the cascade process with these functions is equivalent to the original
threshold process.
Conversely, consider a node v in the cascade model, and a set
$$S = \{u_{1}, \ldots , u_{k}\}$$ of its neighbours. Assume that the
nodes in S try to activate v in the order $$u_{1}, \ldots , u_{k}$$, and
let $$S_{i} = \{u_{1}, \ldots , u_{i}\}$$. Then the probability that v
is not activated by this process is by definition
$$\prod \limits _{i=1}^{k}(1 - p_{v}(u_{i}, S_{i-1}))$$. Recall that
we assumed that the order in which the $$u_{i}$$ try to activate v
does not affect their overall success probability. Hence, this value depends
on the set S only, and we can define
$$f_{v}(S) = \prod \limits _{i=1}^{k}(1 - p_{v}(u_{i}, S_{i-1}))$$.
Analogously, one can show that this instance of the threshold model is
equivalent to the original cascade process.
The paper also proposed a triggering model , where each node v
independently chooses a random “triggering set” $$T_{v}$$
according to some distribution over subsets of its neighbours. To start the
process, we target a set A for initial activation. After this initial iteration, an
inactive node v becomes active in step t if it has a neighbour in its chosen
triggering set $$T_{v}$$ that is active at time $$t - 1$$. (Thus,
v’s threshold has been replaced by a latent subset of $$T_{v}$$ of
neighbours whose behaviour actually affects v).
Theorem 19 Whenever the threshold functions $$f_{v}$$ at every
node are monotone and submodular, the resulting influence function
$$\sigma (\cdot )$$ is monotone and submodular as well.

Reference [10] presented an optimization in selecting new seeds, which is

referred to as the “Cost-Effective Lazy Forward” (CELF) scheme. This
CELF optimization uses the submodularity property of the influence
maximization objective to greatly reduce the number of evaluations on the
influence spread of vertices. Their experimental results demonstrate that
CELF optimization could achieve as much as 700 times speedup in
selecting seed vertices.
Reference [2] designed schemes to combine with the CELF
optimisation to improve the greedy algorithms of [8], and proposed a
degree discount heuristics with influence spreads to replace the degree and
distance centrality heuristics of [8]. The advantage of these new heuristics
is their speed. The algorithm using this degree discount has order of
$$O(klogn+m)$$ when compared to the greedy algorithm which has
O(knRm). Here n denotes the number of vertices, m denotes the number of
edges, k is the number of elements in the k-set of influentials, and R is the
number of simulations. These schemes when applied to the independent
cascade model showed a completion time of only a few milliseconds, which
is less than one-millionth of the time of the fastest greedy algorithm.
Additionally, they also show a good influence spread performance. The
developed algorithms were tested on the same datasets as used in [8].
However these heuristics developed in [2] apply only to the independent
cascade model and not to the independent cascade model. Reference [3]
developed the LDAG algorithm for this latter model. In this model, a local
DAG is computed for each vertex v and the influence to v is restricted to
within this DAG structure. To select local DAGs that could cover a
significant portion of influence propagation, a fast greedy algorithm of
adding nodes into the local DAG of a node v one by one was proposed such
that the individual influence of these nodes to v is larger than a threshold
parameter $$\theta $$. After constructing the local DAGs, the greedy
approach of selecting seeds that provide the maximum incremental
influence spread with a fast scheme of updating incremental influence
spread of every node was combined. This combined fast local DAG
construction and fast incremental influence update make the LDAG
algorithm very efficient. This algorithm was found to perform much faster
than the greedy algorithm at a fraction of its completion time. However,
finding the optimal LDAG is still NP-hard.
Reference [6] proposed SIMPATH , an algorithm under the linear
cascade model that addresses the drawbacks found in [8] using several
optimisations. The paper proves that in the linear threshold model which
says the spread of a set of nodes can be calculated as the sum of spreads of
each node in the set on appropriate induced subgraphs. SIMPATH builds on
the CELF optimization. However, instead of using expensive MC
simulations to estimate the spread, the spread is computed by enumerating
the simple paths starting from the seed nodes. Although the problem of
enumerating simple paths is #P-hard, majority of the influence flows within
a small neighbourhood, since probabilities of paths diminish rapidly as they
get longer. Thus, the spread can be computed accurately by enumerating
paths within a small neighbourhood. A parameter $$\eta $$ is
proposed to control the size of the neighbourhood that represents a direct
trade-off between accuracy of spread estimation and running time. Two
novel optimizations were proposed to reduce the number of spread
estimation calls made by SIMPATH . The first one, called the VERTEX
COVER OPTIMIZATION , cuts down on the number of calls made in the
first iteration, thus addressing a key weakness of the simple greedy
algorithm that is not addressed by CELF. Since the spread of a node can be
computed directly using the spread of its out-neighbors, in the first iteration,
a vertex cover of the graph is first constructed and the spread only for these
nodes is obtained using the spread estimation procedure. The spread of the
rest of the nodes is derived from this. This significantly reduces the running
time of the first iteration. Next, it is observed that as the size of the seed set
grows in subsequent iterations, the spread estimation process slows down
considerably. Another optimization called LOOK AHEAD OPTIMIZATION
which addresses this issue and keeps the running time of subsequent
iterations small is proposed. Specifically, using a parameter l, it picks the
top-l most promising seed candidates in the start of an iteration and shares
the marginal gain computation of those candidates. The paper concludes by
showing through extensive experiments on four real datasets that the
SIMPATH algorithm is more efficient, consumes less memory and produces
seed sets with larger spread of influence than LDAG. Indeed, among all the
settings we tried, the seed selection quality of SIMPATH is quite close to
the simple greedy algorithm.
Reference [9] studied the contrasting behaviour between cascading
models and viral marketing by analysing a person-to-person
recommendation network, consisting of 4 million people who made 16
million recommendations on half a million products. This network was
retrieved from an online retailer’s incentivised viral marketing program.
The website gave discounts to customers recommending any of its products
to others, and then tracked the resulting purchases and additional
recommendations. Although, it is assumed in epidemic models such as
SIRS model that individuals have equal probability of being infected every
time they interact, the paper observed that the probability of infection
decreases with repeated interaction. This means that providing excessive
incentives for customers to recommend products could backfire by
weakening the credibility of the very same links they are trying to take
advantage of.
Cascading models also often assume that individuals either have a
constant probability of ‘converting’ every time they interact with an
infected individual [5], or that they convert once the fraction of their
contacts who are infected exceeds a threshold [7]. In both cases, an
increasing number of infected contacts results in an increased likelihood of
infection. Instead, it was found that the probability of purchasing a product
increases with the number of recommendations received, but quickly
saturated to a constant and relatively low probability. This meant that
individuals are often impervious to the recommendations of their friends,
and resist buying items that they do not want.
In network-based epidemic models, extremely highly connected
individuals play a very important role. For example, in needle sharing and
sexual contact networks these nodes become the “super-spreaders” by
infecting a large number of people. But these models assume that a high
degree node has as much of a probability of infecting each of its neighbours
as a low degree node does. In contrast, it was found that there are limits to
how influential high degree nodes are in the recommendation network. As a
person sends out more and more recommendations past a certain number
for a product, the success per recommendation declines. This indicates that
individuals have influence over a few of their friends, but not everybody
they know.
 A simple stochastic model was also presented that allowed for the
presence of relatively large cascades for a few products, but reflects well
the general tendency of recommendation chains to terminate after just a
short number of steps. Aggregating such cascades over all the products, a
highly disconnected network was obtained, where the largest component
grew over time by aggregating typically very small but occasionally fairly
large components. It was observed that the most popular categories of items
recommended within communities in the largest component reflected
differing interests between these communities. A model which showed that
these smaller and more tightly knit groups tended to be more conducive to
viral marketing was presented.
The characteristics of product reviews and effectiveness of
recommendations was found to vary by category and price. A small fraction
of the products accounted for a large proportion of the recommendations.
Although not quite as extreme in proportions, the number of successful
recommendations also varied widely by product. Still, a sizeable portion of
successful recommendations were for a product with only one such sale—
hinting at a long tail phenomenon.
Thus viral marketing was found to be, in general, not as epidemic as one
might have hoped. Marketers hoping to develop normative strategies for
word-of-mouth advertising should analyze the topology and interests of the
social network of their customers.
By investigating the attributes and relative influence of 1.6 million
Twitter users by tracking 74 million diffusion events that took place on the
Twitter follower graph over a two month interval in 2009, [1] found that
although individuals who have been influential in the past and who have
many followers are indeed more likely to be influential in the future, this
intuition is correct only on average. Although it is the most cost-effective
approach for marketing, we have learnt that finding these influentials is NP-
hard. Instead, they propose that under certain circumstances it was effective
to find the “ordinary influencers” , individuals who exert average, or even
less-than-average influence. However, these results were based on statistical
modelling of observational data and thus do not imply causality. It is quite
possible, for example, that content seeded by outside sources— e.g.,
marketers—may diffuse quite differently than content selected by users
themselves. Likewise, while a wide range of possible cost functions was
considered, other assumptions about costs are certainly possible and may
lead to different conclusions. Nevertheless, these finding regarding the
relative efficacy of ordinary influencers is consistent with previous
theoretical work [14] that has also questioned the feasibility of word-of-
mouth strategies that depend on triggering “social epidemics” by targeting
special individuals.
Reference [13] show that even when given access to individuals’ costs,
no mechanism that offers uniform rewards can approximate the optimal
solution within a factor better than
$$\Omega (\frac{logn}{loglogn})$$. The paper introduces incentive
compatible mechanisms which take each users’ true private information and
use it to identify and reward the subset of initial adopters. Thereby
developing incentive compatible mechanisms that compare favourably
against the optimal influence maximization solution. The experiments used
Facebook network data that had almost a million nodes and over 72 million
edges, together with a representative cost distribution that was obtained by
running a simulated campaign on Amazon’s Mechanical Turk platform.

References
1. Bakshy, Eytan, J.M. Hofman, W.A. Mason, and D.J. Watts. 2011. Everyone’s an influencer:
quantifying influence on twitter. In Proceedings of the fourth ACM international conference on
Web search and data mining, 65–74. ACM.

2. Chen, Wei, Yajun Wang, and Siyu Yang. 2009. Efficient influence maximization in social
networks. In Proceedings of the 15th ACM SIGKDD international conference on Knowledge
discovery and data mining, 199–208. ACM.

3. Chen, Wei , Yifei Yuan, and Li Zhang. 2010. Scalable influence maximization in social networks
under the linear threshold model. In 2010 IEEE 10th international conference on data mining
(ICDM), 88–97. IEEE.

4. Domingos, Pedro, and Matt Richardson. 2001. Mining the network value of customers. In
Proceedings of the seventh ACM SIGKDD international conference on Knowledge discovery and
data mining, 57–66. ACM.

5. Goldenberg, Jacob, Barak Libai, and Eitan Muller. 2001. Talk of the network: A complex
systems look at the underlying process of word-of-mouth. Marketing Letters 12 (3): 211–223.
[Crossref]

6. Goyal, Amit, Wei Lu, and Laks V.S. Lakshmanan. 2011. Simpath: An efficient algorithm for
influence maximization under the linear threshold model. In 2011 IEEE 11th international
conference on data mining (ICDM), 211–220. IEEE.

7. Granovetter, Mark S. 1977. The strength of weak ties. In Social networks, 347–367. Elsevier.
8.
Kempe, David, Jon Kleinberg, and Éva Tardos. 2003. Maximizing the spread of influence
through a social network. In Proceedings of the ninth ACM SIGKDD international conference on
Knowledge discovery and data mining, 137–146. ACM.

9. Leskovec, Jure, Lada A. Adamic, and Bernardo A. Huberman. 2007. The dynamics of viral
marketing. ACM Transactions on the Web (TWEB) 1 (1): 5.
[Crossref]

10. Leskovec, Jure, Andreas Krause, Carlos Guestrin, Christos Faloutsos, Jeanne Van Briesen, and
Natalie Glance. 2007. Cost-effective outbreak detection in networks. In Proceedings of the 13th
ACM SIGKDD international conference on Knowledge discovery and data mining, 420–429.
ACM.

11. Resnick, Paul, Neophytos Iacovou, Mitesh Suchak, Peter Bergstrom, and John Riedl. Grouplens:
An open architecture for collaborative filtering of netnews. In Proceedings of the 1994 ACM
conference on computer supported cooperative work, 175–186. ACM.

12. Richardson, Matthew, and Pedro Domingos. 2002. Mining knowledge-sharing sites for viral
marketing. In Proceedings of the eighth ACM SIGKDD international conference on knowledge
discovery and data mining, 61–70. ACM.

13. Singer, Yaron. 2012. How to win friends and influence people, truthfully: Influence
maximization mechanisms for social networks. In Proceedings of the fifth ACM international
conference on web search and data mining, 733–742. ACM.

14. Watts, Duncan J., and Peter Sheridan Dodds. 2007. Influentials, networks, and public opinion
formation. Journal of Consumer Research 34 (4): 441–458.
[Crossref]
© Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2018
Krishna Raj P.M., Ankith Mohan and K.G. SrinivasaPractical Social
Network Analysis with PythonComputer Communications and
Networkshttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-96746-2_10

10. Outbreak Detection

Krishna Raj P. M.1 , Ankith Mohan1 and K. G. Srinivasa2
(1)
Department of ISE, Ramaiah Institute of Technology, Bangalore, Karnataka,
India
(2)
Department of Information Technology, C.B.P. Government Engineering
College, Jaffarpur, Delhi, India

Krishna Raj P. M.
Email: krishnarajpm@gmail.com

Outbreak detection is the task of detecting outbreaks in networks, where

given a network and a dynamic process spreading over this network, we
have to select a set of nodes to detect this process as effectively as possible.
Multiple situations fall under these settings. Consider a city water
distribution network, delivering water to households via pipes and junctions.
Accidental or malicious intrusions can cause contaminants to spread over
the network, and we want to select a few locations (pipe junctions) to install
sensors, in order to detect these contaminations as quickly as possible. Next,
if we have a social network of interactions between people, we want to
select a small set of people to monitor, so that any disease outbreak can be
detected early, when very few people are infected.

In the domain of blogs, bloggers publish posts and use hyper-links to refer
to other bloggers’ posts and content on the web. Each post is time stamped,
so the spread of information on the Blogspace can be observed. In this
setting, we want to select a set of blogs which are most up to date, i.e, our
goal is to select a small set of blogs which “catch” as many cascades as
possible.

10.1 Battle of the Water Sensor Networks

Following the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, in the United States,
awareness for possible attacks on the water grid has increased dramatically.
The most feared of all the threats to the water supply system is the
deliberate chemical or biological contaminant injection, due to both the
uncertainty of the type of injected contaminant and its consequences, and
the uncertainty of the time and location of the injection. An online
contaminant monitoring system is considered as a major opportunity to
protect against the impacts of a deliberate contaminant intrusion. To develop
the infrastructure required to efficiently run this monitoring system, the
Battle of the Water Sensor Networks (BWSN) competition was undertaken
as part of the 8th Annual Water Distribution Systems Analysis Symposium,
Cincinnati, Ohio, August 27–29, 2006.

The following four quantitative design objectives were used for evaluation:

10.1.1 Expected Time of Detection ( $$Z_{1}$$)

For a particular contamination, the time of detection by a sensor is defined

as the elapsed time from the start of the contamination event to the first
identified presence of a non-zero contaminant concentration. The time of
first detection $$t_{j}$$, refers to the jth sensor location. The time of
detection (or detection time (DT)) for the sensor network for a particular
contamination, $$t_{d}$$, is the minimum among all the sensors present
in the design
$$\begin{aligned} t_{d} = min_{j}t_{j} \end{aligned}$$
(10.1)
The objective function to be minimized is the expected value computed over
the assumed probability distribution of the contaminations
$$\begin{aligned} Z{i} = E(t_{d}) \end{aligned}$$
(10.2)
where $$E(t_{d})$$ denotes the mathematical expectation of the
minimum detection time $$t_{d}$$. Undetected events have no detection
times.

10.1.2 Expected Population Affected Prior to Detection (

$$Z_{2}$$)

For a specific contamination, the population affected is a function of the

ingested contaminant mass. The assumptions are that no mass is ingested
after detection and that all mass ingested during undetected events is not
counted. For a particular contamination, the mass ingested by any individual
at a network node i is
$$\begin{aligned} M_{i} = \varphi \Delta t \sum \limits
_{k=1}^{N}c_{ik}\rho _{ik} \end{aligned}$$
(10.3)
where $$\varphi $$ denotes the mean amount of water consumed by an
individual (L/day/person), $$\Delta t$$ is the evaluation time step (days),
$$c_{ik}$$ is the contaminant concentration for node i at time step k
(mg/L), $$\rho _{ik}$$ is the dose rate multiplier for node i and time step
k, and N is the number of evaluation time steps prior to detection. The series
$$\rho _{ik}$$, $$k=1,\ldots , N$$ has a mean of 1 and is intended to
model the variation in ingestion rate throughout the day. It is assumed that
the ingestion rate varies with the water demand rate at the respective node,
thus
$$\begin{aligned} \rho _{ik} = q_{ik}/\overline{q_{i}}\ \forall \ k \in N
\end{aligned}$$
(10.4)
where $$q_{ik}$$ is the water demand for time step k and node i, and
$$q_{i}$$ is the average water demand at node i.
A dose-response model is used to express the probability that any person
ingesting mass $$M_{i}$$ will be infected
$$\begin{aligned} R_{i} = \Phi \{\beta log_{10}[(M_{i}/W)/D_{50}]\}
\end{aligned}$$
(10.5)
where $$R_{i}$$ is the probability that a person who ingests contaminant
mass $$M_{i}$$ will become infected, $$\beta $$ is called the Probit
slope parameter, W is the average body mass (kg/person), $$D_{50}$$ is
the dose that would result in a 0.5 probability of being infected (mg/kg), and
$$\Phi $$ is the standard normal cumulative distribution function.
The population affected (PA), $$P_{a}$$, for a particular contamination
is calculated as
$$\begin{aligned} P_{a} = \sum \limits _{i=1}^{V}R_{i}P_{i}
\end{aligned}$$
(10.6)
where $$P_{i}$$ is the population assigned to node i and V is the total
number of nodes. The objective function to be minimized is the expected
value of $$P_{a}$$ computed over the assumed probability distribution
of contamination events
$$\begin{aligned} Z_{2} = E(P_{a}) \end{aligned}$$
(10.7)
where $$E(P_{a})$$ denotes the mathematical expectation of the affected
population $$P_{a}$$.

10.1.3 Expected Consumption of Contaminated Water Prior

to Detection ( $$Z_{3}$$)

$$Z_{3}$$ is the expected volume of contaminated water consumed prior

to detection.
$$\begin{aligned} Z_{3} = E(V_{d}) \end{aligned}$$
(10.8)
where $$V_{d}$$ denotes the total volumetric water demand that exceeds
a predefined hazard concentration threshold C; and $$E(V_{d})$$ is the
mathematical expectation of $$V_{d}$$.

10.1.4 Detection Likelihood ( $$Z_{4}$$)

Given a sensor network design, the detection likelihood (DL) is estimated

by
$$\begin{aligned} Z_{4} = \frac{1}{S}\sum \limits _{r=1}{S}d_{r}
\end{aligned}$$
(10.9)
where $$d_{r} = 1$$ if contamination scenario r is detected, and zero
otherwise; and S denotes the total number of the contaminations considered.

10.1.5 Evaluation
A methodology for evaluating a given sensor design should comply with
two basic requirements: (i) it should be objective, and (ii) it should assess a
design regardless of the method used to receive it.

To accomplish this the utility developed comprised of two steps: (i)

generation of a matrix of contamination injection events in either of two
mechanisms: random, using Monte Carlo-type simulations selected by the
user; or deterministic, injection at each node each 5 min, and (ii) evaluation
of $$Z_{i} (i = 1, \ldots , 4)$$ according to the matrix of contamination
injection events constructed in Stage 1.

This utility was distributed to all participants prior to the BWSN for testing
both the networks.

Thus, the goal of the BWSN was to objectively compare the solutions
obtained using different approaches to the problem of placing five and 20
sensors for two real water distribution systems of increasing complexity and
for four derivative cases, taking into account the aforementioned four design
objectives. Fifteen contributions were received from academia and
practitioners.

Reference [5] provides a summary of these contributions and concludes that

due to the presence of four different objective functions, BWSN is a multi-
objective problem. In a multi-objective context the goal is to find, from all
the possible feasible solutions, the set of non-dominated solutions, where a
non-dominated solution is optimal in the sense that there is no other solution
that dominates it (i.e, there is no other solution that is better than that
solution with respect to all objectives). This leads to two observations: (i)
comparisons can be made on the $$Z_{i} (i = 1, 2, 3)$$ versus
$$Z_{4}$$ domains, and (ii) a unique single optimal solution cannot be
identified, thus a “winner” cannot be declared. It should also be emphasized
in this context that alternate comparison methods could have been
employed, thus there is no claim that the adopted comparison approach is
better in an absolute sense than an alternative methodology. However, this
assessment provides indications of breadth and similarity of findings, as
desired using different mathematical algorithms.
This competition found that general guidelines cannot be set. Engineering
judgment and intuition alone are not sufficient for effectively placing
sensors, and these need to be supported by quantitative analysis. The
analysis has shown that sensors do not need to be clustered and that placing
sensors at vertical assets (sources, tanks, and pumps) is not a necessity. In
fact, most of the designs have not placed sensors at vertical assets. In some
cases, there were considerable similarities where the same nodes (or nodes
at a immediate vicinity) were selected by many of the methodologies.

10.2 Cost-Effective Lazy Forward Selection

Algorithm
Of all the sensor designs contributed to the BWSN, one of the interesting
ones was [3]. Reference [4] explains in detail the algorithm behind the near
optimal sensor placements. Outbreak detection objectives are found to
exhibit the property of submodularity. In the previous chapter, we have
learnt that problems having these submodularity properties can be solved
using the hill-climbing approach. The CELF algorithm presented in this
paper are a factor of 700 times faster than this greedy algorithm.
References [2, 3] further detail the results in support of the algorithm
presented in this paper.

The paper proves that the objective functions described in the previous
section are submodular and by exploiting this property, an efficient
approximation algorithm was proposed.

Detection of outbreaks essentially involves strategically planting sensors on

a subset A of nodes in a graph $$G = (V,E)$$ which will trigger an alarm
to indicate that an outbreak has been detected. However, these sensors are
expensive with each sensor s having an associated non-negative cost c(s)
and a reward R(s). Thus, the total cost of all the sensors, c(A) is
$$c(A) = \sum \limits _{s \in A}c(s)$$ which must not exceed a total
budget of B which is the maximum amount that can be spent on the sensors.
The goal is to solve the optimisation function
$$\begin{aligned} max_{A \subseteq V} R(A)\ subject\ to\ c(A) \le B
\end{aligned}$$
(10.10)
An event $$i \in I$$ from set I of contaminants originates from a node
$$s' \in V$$, and spreads through the network, affecting other nodes.
Eventually, it reaches a monitored node $$s \in A \subseteq V$$ and gets
detected. Depending on the time of detection $$t = T(i,s)$$, and the
impact on the network before the detection, a penalty $$\pi _{i}(t)$$. The
goal is to minimize the expected penalty over all possible contaminants i:
$$\begin{aligned} \pi (A) = \sum \limits _{i}P(i)\pi _{i}(T(i,A))
\end{aligned}$$
(10.11)
where for $$A \subseteq V$$, $$T(i,A) = min_{s \in A}T(i,s)$$ is the
time until event i is detected by one of the sensors in A, and P is a given
probability distribution over the events.

$$\pi _{i}(t)$$ is assumed to be monotonically nondecreasing in t, i.e, late

detection are never preferred if they can be avoided. Also
$$T(i,\phi ) = \infty $$, and set $$\pi _{i}(\infty )$$ to some maximum
penalty incurred for not detecting event i.

Instead of maximising the penalty $$\pi (A)$$, the paper considers

penalty reduction, $$R_{i}(A) = \pi _{i}(\infty ) - \pi _{i}(T(i,A))$$ and
the expected penalty reduction
$$\begin{aligned} R(A) = \sum \limits _{i}P(i)R_{i}(A) = \pi (\phi ) - \pi
(A) \end{aligned}$$
(10.12)
which describes the expected reward received from placing sensors.

For the DL function, $$\pi _{i}(t) = 0$$ and $$\pi _{i}(\infty ) = 1$$,
i.e, no penalty is incurred if the outbreak is detected in finite time, otherwise
the incurred penalty is 1. For the DT measure,
$$\pi _{i}(t) = min(t,T_{max})$$, where $$T_{max}$$ is the time
horizon. The PA criterion has $$\pi _{i}(t)$$ is the size of the cascade i at
time t, and $$\pi _{i}(\infty )$$ is the size of the cascade at the end of the
horizon.

The penalty reduction function R(A) has several properties: First,

$$R(\phi ) = 0$$, i.e, we do not reduce the penalty if we do not place any
sensors. Second, R is non-decreasing, i.e,
$$R(A) \le R(B)\ \forall \ A \subseteq B \subseteq V$$. So, adding sensors
can only decrease the penalty. Finally,
$$\forall \ A \subseteq B \subseteq V$$ and sensors
$$s \in V \setminus B$$,
$$R(A \cup \{s\}) - R(A) \ge R(B \cup \{s\}) - R(B)$$, i.e, R is
submodular.

To solve the outbreak detection problem, we will have to simultaneously

optimize multiple objective functions. Then, each A is
$$R(A) = (R_{1}(A), \ldots , R_{m}(A))$$. However, there can arise a
situation where $$A_{1}$$ and $$A_{2}$$ are incomparable, i.e,
$$R_{1}(A_{1}) > R_{1}(A_{2})$$, but
$$R_{2}(A_{1}) > R_{2}(A_{2})$$. So, we hope for Pareto-optimal
solutions. A is said to be Pareto-optimal, if there does not exist $$A'$$
such that $$R_{i}(A') \ge R_{i}(A) \forall i$$, and
$$R_{j}(A') > R_{j}(A)$$ for some j. One approach to finding such
Pareto-optimal solutions is scalarization . Here, one picks positive weights
$$\lambda _{1}> 0, \ldots , \lambda _{m} > 0$$, and optimizes the
objective $$R(A) = \sum \limits _{i}\lambda _{i}R_{i}(A)$$. Any
solution maximising R(A) is guaranteed to be Pareto-optimal, and by
varying the weights $$\lambda _{i}$$, different Pareto-optimal solutions
can be obtained.

If we consider that every node has equal cost (i.e., unit cost, $$c(s) = 1$$
for all locations s), then the greedy algorithm starts with
$$A_{0} = \phi $$, and iteratively, in step k, adds the location
$$s_{k}$$ which maximizes the marginal gain
$$\begin{aligned} s_{k} = argmax_{s \in V \setminus A_{k-1}} R(A_{k-
1} \cup {s}) - R(A_{k-1}) \end{aligned}$$
(10.13)
The algorithm stops, once it has selected B elements. For this unit cost case,
the greedy algorithm is proved to achieve atleast $$63\%$$ optimal score
(Chap. 9). We will refer to this algorithm as the unit cost algorithm .
In the case where the nodes non-constant costs, the greedy algorithm that
iteratively adds sensors until the budget is exhausted can fail badly, since a
very expensive sensor providing reward r is preferred over a cheaper sensor
providing reward $$r - \epsilon $$. To avoid this, we modify Eq. 10.13 to
take costs into account
 $$\begin{aligned} s_{k} = argmax_{s \in V \setminus A_{k-1}}
\frac{R(A_{k-1} \cup {s}) - R(A_{k-1})}{c(s)} \end{aligned}$$
(10.14)
So the greedy algorithm picks the element maximising the benefit/cost ratio.
The algorithm stops once no element can be added to the current set A
without exceeding the budget. Unfortunately, this intuitive generalization of
the greedy algorithm can perform arbitrarily worse than the optimal
solution. Consider the case where we have two locations, $$s_{1}$$ and
$$s_{2}$$ , $$c(s_{1}) = \epsilon $$ and $$c(s_{2}) = B$$. Also
assume we have only one contaminant i, and $$R({s_{1}}) = 2\epsilon $$
, and $$R({s_{2}}) = B$$. Now,
$$R(({s_{1}})-R(\phi ))/c(s_{1}) = 2$$, and
$$R(({s_{2}})-R(\phi ))/c(s_{2}) = 1$$. Hence the greedy algorithm
would pick $$s_{1}$$. After selecting $$s_{1}$$, we cannot afford
$$s_{2}$$ anymore, and our total reward would be $$\epsilon $$.
However, the optimal solution would pick $$s_{2}$$, achieving total
penalty reduction of B. As $$\epsilon $$ goes to 0, the performance of the
greedy algorithm becomes arbitrarily bad. This algorithm is called the
benefit-cost greedy algorithm .
The paper proposes the Cost-Effective Forward selection (CEF) algorithm.
It computes $$A_{GCB}$$ using the benefit-cost greedy algorithm and
$$A_{GUC}$$ using the unit-cost greedy algorithm. For both of these,
CEF only considers elements which do not exceed the budget B. CEF then
returns the solution with higher score. Even though both solutions can be
arbitrarily bad, if R is a non-decreasing submodular function with
$$R(\phi ) = 0$$. Then we get Eq. 10.15.
$$\begin{aligned} max\{R(A_{GCB}),R(A_{GUC})\} \ge \frac{1}
{2}\left( 1-\frac{1}{e}\right) max_{A, c(A) \le B}R(A) \end{aligned}$$
(10.15)
The running time of CEF is O(B|V|). The approximation guarantees of
$$(1-\frac{1}{e})$$ and $$\frac{1}{2}(1-\frac{1}{e})$$ in the unit and
non- constant cost cases are offline, i.e, we can state them in advance before
running the actual algorithm. Online bounds on the performance can be
found through arbitrary sensor locations. For $$\hat{A} \subseteq V$$
and each $$s \in V \setminus \hat{A}$$, let
$$\delta _{s} = R(\hat{A} \cup \{s\}) - R(\hat{A})$$. Let
$$r_{s} = \delta _{s}/c(s)$$, and let $$s_{1}, \ldots , s_{m}$$ be the
sequence of locations with $$r_{s}$$ in decreasing order. Let k be such
that $$C = \sum \limits _{i=1}^{k-1}c(s_{i}) \le B$$ and
$$\sum \limits _{i=1}^{k}c(s_{i}) > B$$. Let
$$\lambda = (B-C)/c(s_{k})$$, then we get Eq. 10.16.
$$\begin{aligned} max_{A,c(A)\le B}R(A) \le R(\hat{A}) + \sum \limits
_{i=1}^{k-1}\delta _{s_{i}} + \lambda \delta _{s_{k}} \end{aligned}$$
(10.16)
This computes how far away $$\hat{A}$$ is from the optimal solution.
This is found to give a 31% bound.
Most outbreaks are sparse, i.e, affect only a small area of network, and
hence are only detected by a small number of nodes. Hence, most nodes s
do not reduce the penalty incurred by an outbreak, i.e, $$R_{i}(s) = 0$$.
However, this sparsity is only present when penalty reductions are
considered. If for each sensor $$s \in V$$ and contaminant $$i \in I$$
we store the actual penalty $$\pi _{i}(s)$$, the resulting representation is
not sparse. By representing the penalty function R as an inverted index,
which allows fast lookup of the penalty reductions by sensor s, the sparsity
can be exploited. Therefore, the penalty reduction can be computed as given
in Eq. 10.17.
$$\begin{aligned} R(A) = \sum \limits _{i:i\ detected\ by\
A}P(i)max_{s\in A}R_{i}(\{s\}) \end{aligned}$$
(10.17)
Even if we can quickly evaluate the score R(A) of any A, we still need to
perform a large number of these evaluations in order to run the greedy
algorithm. If we select k sensors among |V| locations, we roughly need k|V|
function evaluations. We can exploit submodularity further to require far
fewer function evaluations in practice. Assume we have computed the
marginal increments $$\delta _{s}(A) = R(A \cup \{s\}) - R(A)$$ (or
$$\delta _{s}(A)/c(s))$$ for all $$s \in V \setminus A$$. As our node
selection A grows, the marginal increments $$\delta _{s'}$$ (and
$$\delta _{s'}/c(s)$$) (i.e., the benefits for adding sensor $$s'$$) can
never increase: For $$A \subseteq B \subseteq V$$, it holds that
$$\delta _{s}(A) \ge \delta _{s}(B)$$. So instead of recomputing
$$\delta _{s} \equiv \delta _{s}(A)$$ for every sensor after adding
$$s'$$ (and hence requiring $$|V| - |A|$$ evaluations of R), we perform
lazy evaluations: Initially, we mark all $$\delta _{s}$$ as invalid. When
finding the next location to place a sensor, we go through the nodes in
decreasing order of their $$\delta _{s}$$. If the $$\delta _{s}$$ for the
top node s is invalid, we recompute it, and insert it into the existing order of
the $$\delta _{s}$$ (e.g., by using a priority queue). In many cases, the
recomputation of $$\delta _{s}$$ will lead to a new value which is not
much smaller, and hence often, the top element will stay the top element
even after recomputation. In this case, we found a new sensor to add,
without having re-evaluated $$\delta _{s}$$ for every location s. The
correctness of this lazy procedure follows directly from submodularity, and
leads to far fewer (expensive) evaluations of R. This is called the lazy
greedy algorithm CELF (Cost-Effective Lazy Forward selection) . This is
found to have a factor 700 improvement in speed compared to CEF.

10.2.1 Blogspace

A dataset having 45000 blogs with 10.5 million posts and 16.2 million links
was taken. Every cascade has a single starting post, and other posts
recursively join by linking to posts within the cascade, whereby the links
obey time order. We detect cascades by first identifying starting post and
then following in-links. 346, 209 non-trivial cascades having at least 2
nodes were discovered. Since the cascade size distribution is heavy-tailed,
the analysis was limited to only cascades that had at least 10 nodes. The
final dataset had 17, 589 cascades, where each blog participated in 9.4
different cascades on average.

Figure 10.1 shows the results when PA function is optimized. The offline
and the online bounds can be computed regardless of the algorithm used.
CELF shows that we are at $$13.8\%$$ away from optimal solution. In
the right, we have the performance using various objective functions (from
top to bottom: DL, DT, PA). DL increases the fastest, which means that one
only needs to read a few blogs to detect most of the cascades, or
equivalently that most cascades hit one of the big blogs. However, the
population affected (PA) increases much slower, which means that one
needs many more blogs to know about stories before the rest of population
does.

../images/462433_1_En_10_Chapter/462433_1_En_10_Fig1_HTML.
gif
 Fig. 10.1

(Left) Performance of CELF algorithm and off-line and on-line

bounds for PA objective function. (Right) Compares objective
functions

In Fig. 10.2, the CELF method is compared with several intuitive heuristic
selection techniques. The heuristics are: the number of posts on the blog, the
cumulative number of out-links of blog’s posts, the number of in-links the
blog received from other blogs in the dataset, and the number of out-links to
other blogs in the dataset. CELF is observed to greatly outperform the other
methods. For the figure in the right, given a budget of B posts, we select a
set of blogs to optimize PA objective. For the heuristics, a set of blogs to
optimize chosen heuristic was selected, e.g., the total number of in-links of
selected blogs while still fitting inside the budget of B posts. Again, CELF
outperforms the next best heuristics by $$41\%$$.

../images/462433_1_En_10_Chapter/462433_1_En_10_Fig2_HTML.
gif
Fig. 10.2

Heuristic blog selection methods. (Left) unit cost model, (Right)

number of posts cost model

10.2.2 Water Networks

In this water distribution system application, the data and rules introduced
by the Battle of Water Sensor Networks (BWSN) challenge was used. Both
the small network on 129 nodes (BWSN1), and a large, realistic, 12, 527
node distribution network (BWSN2) provided as part of the BWSN
challenge were considered. In addition a third water distribution network
(NW3) of a large metropolitan area in the United States was considered. The
network (not including the household level) contains 21, 000 nodes and
25, 000 pipes (edges). The networks consist of a static description (junctions
and pipes) and dynamic parameters (time-varying water consumption
demand patterns at different nodes, opening and closing of valves, pumps,
tanks, etc).
In the BWSN challenge, the goal is to select a set of 20 sensors,
simultaneously optimizing the objective functions DT, PA and DL. To
obtain cascades a realistic disease model was used, which depends on the
demands and the contaminant concentration at each node. In order to
evaluate these objectives, the EPANET simulator was used, which is based
on a physical model to provide realistic predictions on the detection time
and concentration of contaminant for any possible contamination event.
Simulations of 48 h length, with 5 min simulation timesteps were
considered. Contaminations can happen at any node and any time within the
first 24 h, and spread through the network according to the EPANET
simulation. The time of the outbreak is important, since water consumption
varies over the day and the contamination spreads at different rates
depending on the time of the day. Altogether, a set of 3.6 million possible
contamination scenarios were considered, each of which were associated
with a “cascade” of contaminant spreading over the network.

Figure 10.3 presents the CELF score, the off-line and on-line bounds for PA
objective on the BWSN2 network. On the right is shown CELF’s
performance on all 3 objective functions.

../images/462433_1_En_10_Chapter/462433_1_En_10_Fig3_HTML.
gif
Fig. 10.3

(Left) CELF with offline and online bounds for PA objective.

(Right) Different objective functions

Figure 10.4 shows two 20 sensor placements after optimizing DL and PA

respectively on BWSN2. When optimizing the population affected (PA), the
placed sensors are concentrated in the dense high-population areas, since the
goal is to detect outbreaks which affect the population the most. When
optimizing the detection likelihood, the sensors are uniformly spread out
over the network. Intuitively this makes sense, since according to BWSN
challenge, outbreaks happen with same probability at every node. So, for
DL, the placed sensors should be as close to all nodes as possible.

../images/462433_1_En_10_Chapter/462433_1_En_10_Fig4_HTML.
gif
 Fig. 10.4

Water network sensor placements: (Left) when optimizing PA,

sensors are concentrated in high population areas. (Right) when
optimizing DL, sensors are uniformly spread out

Figure 10.5 shows the scores achieved by CELF compared with several
heuristic sensor placement techniques, where the nodes were ordered by
some “goodness” criteria, and then the top nodes were picked for the PA
objective function. The following criteria were considered: population at the
node, water flow through the node, and the diameter and the number of
pipes at the node. CELF outperforms the best heuristic by $$45\%$$.

../images/462433_1_En_10_Chapter/462433_1_En_10_Fig5_HTML.
gif
Fig. 10.5

Solutions of CELF outperform heuristic approaches

Reference [1] proposed the CELF++ algorithm which the paper showed as
being 35–55% faster than CELF. Here $$\sigma _{S}$$ denotes the
spread of seed set S. A heap Q is maintained with nodes corresponding to
users in the network. The node of Q corresponding to user u stores a tuple of
the form $$<u.mg1, u.prev\_best, u.mg2, u.flag>$$, where
$$u.mg1 = \delta _{u}(S)$$ which is the marginal gain of u w.r.t the
current seed set S, $$u.prev\_best$$ is the node that has the maximal
marginal gain among all the users examined in the current iteration before
user u, $$u.mg2 = \delta _{u}(S \cup \{prev\_best\})$$, and u.flag is the
iteration number when u.mg1 was last updated. The idea is that if the node
$$u.prev\_best$$ is picked as a seed in the current iteration, the marginal
gain of u w.r.t ( $$S \cup \{prev\_best\}$$) need not be recomputed in the
next iteration. In addition to computing $$\Delta _{u}(S)$$, it is not
necessary to compute $$\Delta _{u}(S \cup \{prev\_best\})$$ from
scratch. The algorithm can be implemented in an efficient manner such that
both $$\Delta _{u}(S)$$ and $$\Delta _{u}(S \cup \{prev\_best\})$$ are
evaluated simultaneously in a single iteration of Monte Carlo simulation
(which typically contains 10, 000 runs).
The variables S is used to denote the current seed set, last seed to track the
ID of the last seed user picked by the algorithm, and $$cur\_best$$ to
track the user having the maximum marginal gain w.r.t S over all users
examined in the current iteration. The algorithm starts by building the heap
Q initially. Then, it continues to select seeds until the budget k is exhausted.
As in CELF, the root element u of Q is looked at and if u.flag is equal to the
size of the seed set, we pick u as the seed as this indicates that u.mg1 is
actually $$\Delta _{u}(S)$$. The optimization of CELF++ is that we
update u.mg1 without recomputing the marginal gain. Clearly, this can be
done since u.mg2 has already been computed efficiently w.r.t the last seed
node picked. If none of the above cases applies, we recompute the marginal
gain of u.

Reference [6] indicate that uniform immunization programmes undertaken

are unsatisfactory in curtailing the spread of epidemics. Instead they show
results which indicate that targeted immunization achieve the lowering of
epidemics. The targeting of just the most connected individuals is found to
raise the tolerance to infections in the whole population by a dramatic factor.
An instance of this is provided by the spread of computer viruses. Even after
the virus is detected and corresponding patches are developed, it still has a
large lifetime. A similar situation persists in the case of sexually transmitted
diseases where instead of uniform immunization, the approach must be to
identify “superseeders” , the set of the promiscuous individuals who are key
in the spread of the infection.

Problems
Download the DBLP collaboration network dataset at

https://snap.stanford.edu/data/bigdata/communities/com-dblp.ungraph.txt.
gz.

This exercise is to explore how varying the set of initially infected nodes in
a SIR model can affect how a contagion spreads through a network. We
learnt in Sect. 8.2.3 that under the SIR model, every node can be either
susceptible, infected, or recovered and every node starts off as either
susceptible or infected. Every infected neighbour of a susceptible node
infects the susceptible node with probability , and infected nodes can

recover with probability . Recovered nodes are no longer susceptible

and cannot be infected again. The pseudocode is as given in Algorithm 7.

../images/462433_1_En_10_Chapter/462433_1_En_10_Figa_HTML.
gif

57

Implement the SIR model in Algorithm 7 and run 100 simulations with
$$\beta = 0.05$$ and $$\delta = 0.5$$ for each of the following three
graphs:

1. 1.

The graph for the network in the dataset (will be referred to as the real
world graph).

2. 2.

An Erdös-Rényi random graph with the same number of nodes and

edges as the real world graph. Set a random seed of 10.

3. 3.

A preferential attachment graph with the same number of nodes and

expected degree as the real world graph. Set a random seed of 10.
For each of these graphs, initialize the infected set with a single node chosen
uniformly at random. Record the total percentage of nodes that became
infected in each simulation. Note that a simulation ends when there are no
more infected nodes; the total percentage of nodes that became infected at
some point is thus the number of recovered nodes at the end of your
simulation divided by the total number of nodes in the network.

58

Repeat the above process, but instead of selecting a random starting node,
infect the node with the highest degree. Compute the total percentage of
nodes that became infected in each simulation.

59

Repeat the experiments by initialising the infected set to be 10 random

nodes and the top 10 highest degree nodes, respectively. Calculate the total
percentage of nodes that became infected in each simulation.

References

1. 1.
Goyal, Amit, Wei Lu, and Laks V.S. Lakshmanan. 2011. Celf++:
Optimizing the greedy algorithm for influence maximization in social
networks. In Proceedings of the 20th international conference
companion on World wide web, 47–48. ACM.
2. 2.
Krause, Andreas, and Carlos Guestrin. 2005. A note on the budgeted
maximization of submodular functions. 2005.
3. 3.
Krause, Andreas, Jure Leskovec, Carlos Guestrin, Jeanne VanBriesen,
and Christos Faloutsos. 2008. Efficient sensor placement optimization
for securing large water distribution networks. Journal of Water
Resources Planning and Management 134 (6): 516–526.Crossref
4. 4.
 Leskovec, Jure, Andreas Krause, Carlos Guestrin, Christos Faloutsos,
Jeanne VanBriesen, and Natalie Glance. 2007. Cost-effective outbreak
detection in networks. In Proceedings of the 13th ACM SIGKDD
international conference on Knowledge discovery and data mining,
420–429. ACM.
5. 5.
Ostfeld, Avi, James G. Uber, Elad Salomons, Jonathan W. Berry,
William E. Hart, Cindy A. Phillips, Jean-Paul Watson, Gianluca Dorini,
Philip Jonkergouw, Zoran Kapelan, et al. 2008. The battle of the water
sensor networks (BWSN): A design challenge for engineers and
algorithms. Journal of Water Resources Planning and Management
134 (6): 556–568.Crossref
6. 6.
Pastor-Satorras, Romualdo, and Alessandro Vespignani. 2002.
Immunization of complex networks. Physical Review E 65 (3):
036104.Crossref
© Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2018
Krishna Raj P.M., Ankith Mohan and K.G. SrinivasaPractical Social
Network Analysis with PythonComputer Communications and
Networkshttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-96746-2_11

11. Power Law

Krishna Raj P. M.1 , Ankith Mohan1 and K. G. Srinivasa2
(1)
Department of ISE, Ramaiah Institute of Technology, Bangalore, Karnataka,
India
(2)
Department of Information Technology, C.B.P. Government Engineering
College, Jaffarpur, Delhi, India

Krishna Raj P. M.
Email: krishnarajpm@gmail.com

An interesting question to ask is, which are the popular websites? Although
popularity may be considered an elusive term with a lot of varying
definitions, here we will restrict ourselves by taking a snapshot of the Web
and counting the number of in-links to websites and using this a measure of
the site’s popularity.

Another way of looking at this is as follows: As a function of k, what fraction

of sites on the Web have k in-links? Since larger values of k indicate greater
popularity, this should give us the popularity distribution of the Web.

On first thought, one would guess that the popularity would follow a normal
or Gaussian distribution, since the probability of observing a value that
exceeds the mean by more than c times the standard deviation decreases
exponentially in c. Central Limit Theorem supports this fact because it states
that if we take any sequence of small independent random quantities, then in
the limit their sum (or average) will be distributed according to the normal
distribution. So, if we assume that each website decides independently at
random whether to link to any other site, then the number of in-links to a
given page is the sum of many independent random quantities, and hence
we’d expect it to be normally distributed. Then, by this model, the number of
pages with k in-links should decrease exponentially in k, as k grows large.

However, we learnt in Chap. 2 that this is not the case. The fraction of
websites that have k in-links is approximately proportional to $$1/k^{2}$$
(the exponent is slightly larger than 2). A function that decreases as k to some
fixed power, such as $$1/k^{2}$$, is called a power law ; when used to
measure the fraction of items having value k, it says, that it’s possible to see
very large values of k.

Mathematically, a quantity x obeys a power law if it is drawn from a

probability distribution given by Eq. 11.1
$$\begin{aligned} p(x) \propto x^{-\alpha } \end{aligned}$$
(11.1)
where $$\alpha $$ is a constant parameter of the distribution known as the
exponent or scaling parameter.

Going back to the question of popularity, this means that extreme imbalances
with very large values are likely to arise. This is true in reality because there
are a few websites that are greatly popular while compared to others.
Additionally, we have learnt in previous chapters that the degree distributions
of several social network applications exhibit a power law.

We could say that just as the normal distribution is widespread among natural
sciences settings, so is the case of power law when the network in question
has a popularity factor to it.

One way to quickly check if a dataset exhibits a power-law distribution is to

generate a “log-log” plot, i.e, if we want to see if f(k) follows a power law,
we plot log(f(k)) as a function of logk. If this plot has an approximately
straight line whose exponent can be read from the slope (as shown in
Fig. 11.1), then the dataset follows a power law.

../images/462433_1_En_11_Chapter/462433_1_En_11_Fig1_HTML.
gif
Fig. 11.1
 A log-log plot exhibiting a power law

However, [5] argues against this practise of determining whether or not a

dataset follows a power law. The paper found that such straight-line
behaviour was a necessary but by no means sufficient condition for true
power-law behaviour. Instead a statistically principled set of techniques were
presented that allow for the validation and quantification of power laws.
Properly applied, these techniques can provide objective evidence for or
against the claim that a particular distribution follows a power law.

In practice, few empirical phenomena obey power laws for all values of x.
More often the power law applies only for values greater than some
minimum $$x_{min}$$. In such cases we say that the tail of the
distribution follows a power law.

Broadly, the steps to verify power-law exhibition by a dataset is as follows:

1. 1.

Estimate the parameters $$x_{min}$$ and $$\alpha $$ of the

power-law model using maximum likelihood estimation (MLE)
techniques.

2. 2.

Calculate the goodness-of-fit between the data and the power law. If the
resulting p-value is greater than 0.1 the power law is a plausible
hypothesis for the data, otherwise it is rejected.

3. 3.

Compare the power law with alternative hypotheses via a likelihood

ratio test. For each alternative, if the calculated likelihood ratio is
significantly different from zero, then its sign indicates whether the
alternative is favoured over the power-law model or not. Other
established and statistically principled approaches for model
comparison, such as a fully Bayesian approach [9], a cross-validation
 approach [17], or a minimum description length approach [8] can also
be used instead.

The power law has several moniker in various fields. It goes by the term
Lotka distribution for scientific productivity [15], Bradford law for journal
use [4], Pareto law of income distribution [16] and the Zipf law for literary
word frequencies.

11.1 Power Law Random Graph Models

Reference [1] proposed a set of random graph models which exhibit power
law in its degree distributions. The four models are given as follows:

11.1.1 Model A

Model A is the basic model which the subsequent models rely upon. It starts
with no nodes and no edges at time step 0. At time step 1, a node with in-
weight 1 and out-weight 1 is added. At time step $$t + 1$$, with
probability $$1 - \alpha $$ a new node with in-weight 1 and out-weight 1 is
added. With probability $$\alpha $$ a new directed edge (u, v) is added to
the existing nodes. Here the origin u is chosen with probability proportional
to the current out-weight
$$w_{u,t}^{out} \overset{\mathrm {def}}{=} 1+ \delta _{u,t}^{out}$$
and the destination v is chosen with probability proportional to the current in-
weight
$$w_{v,t}^{in} \overset{\mathrm {def}}{=} 1+ \delta _{v,t}^{in}$$.
$$\delta _{u,t}^{out}$$ and $$\delta _{v,t}^{in}$$ denote the out-
degree of u and the in-degree of v at time t, respectively.

The total in-weight (out-weight) of graph in model A increases by 1 at a time

step. At time step t, both total in-weight and total out-weight are exactly t. So
the probability that a new edge is added onto two particular nodes u and v is
exactly as given in Eq. 11.2.
$$\begin{aligned} \alpha \frac{(1+\delta _{u,t}^{out})(1+\delta
_{v,t}^{in})}{t^{2}} \end{aligned}$$
(11.2)

11.1.2 Model B

Model B is a slight improvement of Model A. Two additional positive

constant $$\gamma ^{in}$$ and $$\gamma ^{out}$$ are introduced.
Different powers can be generated for in-degrees and out-degrees. In
addition, the edge density can be independently controlled.

Model B starts with no node and no edge at time step 0. At time step 1, a
node with in-weight $$\gamma ^{in}$$ and out-weight
$$\gamma ^{out}$$ is added. At time step $$t + 1$$, with probability
$$1-\alpha $$ a new node with in-weight $$\gamma ^{in}$$ and out-
weight $$\gamma ^{out}$$ is added. With probability $$\alpha $$ a new
directed edge (u, v) is added to the existing nodes. Here the origin u
(destination v) is chosen proportional to the current out-weight
$$w_{u,t}^{out} \overset{\mathrm {def}}{=} \gamma ^{out} + \delta
_{u,t}^{out}$$
while the current in-weight
$$w_{v,t}^{in} \overset{\mathrm {def}}{=} \gamma ^{in} + \delta
_{v,t}^{in}$$
. $$\delta _{u,t}^{out}$$ and $$\delta _{v,t}^{in}$$ denote the out-
degree of u and the in-degree of v at time t, respectively.

In model B, at time step t the total in-weight $$w_{t}^{in}$$ and the out-
weight $$w_{t}^{out}$$ of the graph are random variables. The
probability that a new edge is added onto two particular nodes u and v is as
given in Eq. 11.3.
$$\begin{aligned} \alpha \frac{(\gamma ^{out}+\delta _{u,t}^{out})
(\gamma ^{in}+\delta _{v,t}^{in})}{w_{t}^{in}w_{t}^{out}}
\end{aligned}$$
(11.3)

11.1.3 Model C

Now we consider Model C, this is a general model with four specified types
of edges to be added.
Assume that the random process of model C starts at time step $$t_{0}$$.
At $$t = t_{0}$$, we start with an initial directed graph with some vertices
and edges. At time step $$t > t_{0}$$, a new vertex is added and four
numbers $$m^{e,e}$$, $$m^{n,e}$$, $$m^{e,n}$$, $$m^{n,n}$$
are drawn according to some probability distribution. Assuming that the four
random variables are bounded, we proceed as follows:

Add $$m^{e,e}$$ edges randomly. The origins are chosen with the
probability proportional to the current out-degree and the destinations
are chosen proportional to the current in-degree.

Add $$m^{e,n}$$ edges into the new vertex randomly. The origins
are chosen with the probability proportional to the current out-degree
and the destinations are the new vertex.

Add $$m^{n,e}$$ edges from the new vertex randomly. The

destinations are chosen with the probability proportional to the current
in-degree and the origins are the new vertex.

Add $$m^{n,n}$$ loops to the new vertex.

Each of these random variables has a well-defined expectation which we

denote by $$\mu ^{e,e}$$, $$\mu ^{n,e}$$, $$\mu ^{e,n}$$,
$$\mu ^{n,n}$$, respectively. We will show that this general process still
yields power law degree distributions and the powers are simple rational
functions of $$\mu ^{e,e}$$, $$\mu ^{n,e}$$, $$\mu ^{e,n}$$,
$$\mu ^{n,n}$$.

11.1.4 Model D

Model A, B and C are all power law models for directed graphs. Here we
describe a general undirected model which we denote by Model D. It is a
natural variant of Model C. We assume that the random process of model C
starts at time step $$t_{0}$$. At $$t = t_{0}$$, we start with an initial
undirected graph with some Vertices and edges. At time step
$$t > t_{0}$$, a new vertex is added and three numbers $$m^{e,e}$$,
$$m^{n,e}$$, $$m^{n,n}$$ are drawn according to some probability
distribution. We assume that the three random variables are bounded. Then
we proceed as follows:

Add $$m^{e,e}$$ edges randomly. The vertices are chosen with the
probability proportional to the current degree.

Add $$m^{e,n}$$ edges randomly. One vertex of each edge must be

the new vertex. The other one is chosen with the probability
proportional to the current degree.

Add $$m^{n,n}$$ loops to the new vertex.

11.2 Copying Model

Reference [3] proposed the following model to generate graphs that exhibit
power law. Consider a directed graph which grows by adding single edges at
discrete time steps. At each such step a vertex may or may not also be added.
Let multiple edges and loops be allowed. More precisely, let $$\alpha $$,
$$\beta $$, $$\gamma $$, $$\delta _{in}$$ and $$\delta _{out}$$ be
non-negative real numbers, with $$\alpha + \beta + \gamma = 1$$. Let
$$G_{0}$$ be any fixed initial directed graph, for example a single vertex
without edges, and let $$t_{0}$$ be the number of edges of $$G_{0}$$.
We set $$G(t_{0}) = G_{0}$$, so at time step t the graph G(t) has exactly t
edges, and a random number n(t) of vertices. In what follows, to choose a
vertex v of G(t) according to $$d_{out} + \delta _{out}$$ means to choose
v so that $$P(v = v_{i})$$ is proportional to
$$d_{out}(v_{i}) + \delta _{out}$$, i.e., so that
$$P(v=v_{i}) = (d_{out}(v_{i}) + \delta _{out})/(t + \delta _{out}n(t))$$.
To choose v according to $$d_{in} + \delta _{in}$$ means to choose v so
that
$$P(v = v_{i}) = (d_{in}(v_{i}) + \delta _{in})/(t + \delta _{in}n(t))$$.
Here $$d_{out}(v_{i})$$ and $$d_{in}(v_{i})$$ are the out-degree and
in-degree of $$v_{i}$$, measured in the graph G(t).

For $$t \ge t_{0}$$ we form $$G(t + 1)$$ from G(t) according to the
following rules:

1. 1.
 With probability $$\alpha $$, add a new vertex v together with an
edge from v to an existing vertex w, where w is chosen according to
$$d_{in} + \delta _{in}$$.

2. 2.

With probability $$\beta $$, add an edge from an existing vertex v to

an existing vertex w, where v and w are chosen independently, v
according to $$d_{out} + \delta _{out}$$, and w according to
$$d_{in} + \delta _{in}$$.

3. 3.

With probability $$\gamma $$, add a new vertex w and an edge from
an existing vertex v to w, where v is chosen according to
$$d_{out} + \delta _{out}$$.

The probabilities $$\alpha $$, $$\beta $$ and $$\gamma $$ clearly

should add up to one. We will also assume that
$$\alpha + \gamma > 0$$. When considering the web graph we take
$$\delta _{out} = 0$$; the motivation is that vertices added under the final
step correspond to web pages which purely provide content - such pages
never change, are born without out-links and remain without out-links.
Vertices added under the first step correspond to usual pages, to which links
may be added later. If we take $$\delta _{in} = 0$$ in addition to
$$\delta _{out} = 0$$, this gives a model in which every page not in
$$G_{0}$$ has either no in-links or no out-links. A non-zero value of
$$\delta _{in}$$ corresponds to insisting that a page is not considered part
of the Web until something points to it, typically one of the big search
engines. We include the parameter $$\delta _{out}$$ to make the model
symmetric with respect to reversing the directions of edges (swapping
$$\alpha $$ with $$\gamma $$ and $$\delta _{in}$$ with
$$\delta _{out}$$), and because we expect the model to be applicable in
contexts other than that of the web graph.
This model allows loops and multiple edges; there seems no reason to
exclude them. However, there will not be very many, so excluding them
would not significantly affect the conclusions.

Reference [7] studied how power law was exhibited in the demand for
products and how companies could operate based on this exhibition to
improve the size and quality of service provided to their patronage.
Companies that have limited inventory space have to opt for operating on
only those products that are at the top of the distribution, so as to remain in
the competition. On the other hand, there exist companies called “infinite-
inventory” spaced who are capable of servicing all products no matter how
low their demand. This way the companies can profit by catering to all kinds
of customers and earn from selling products their limited spaced competitors
could not.

11.3 Preferential Attachment Model

Reference [2] found that a common problem with the Erdös-Rényi (Chap. 3)
and the Watts-Strogatz (Chap. 4) model is that the probability of finding a
highly connected vertex (,i.e, a large k, where k denotes the degree of the
vertex) decreases exponentially with k, thus vertices with large connectivity
are practically absent. In contrast, the power-law tail characterizing P(k) for
the studied networks indicates that highly connected (large k) vertices have a
large chance of occurring, dominating the connectivity.

This is attributed to two properties of the real-world networks that are not
incorporated in either of these models. First, both of these models begin with
a fixed number of vertices which does not change. However, this is rarely the
case in real-world networks, where this number varies. Second, the models
assume that the probability that two vertices are connected is uniform and
random. In contrast, real-world networks exhibit preferential attachment. So,
the probability with which a new vertex connects to the existing vertices is
not uniform, but there is a higher probability to be linked to a vertex that
already has a large number of connections.

This scale-free model was thus proposed to deal with these two issues. Scale-
free in the sense that the frequency of sampling (w.r.t. the growth rate) is
independent of the parameter of the resulting power law graphs. This model
is found to show properties resembling those of real-world networks. To
counter the first issue, starting with a small number $$m_{0}$$ of vertices,
at every time step a new vertex is added with $$m \le m_{0}$$ edges that
link the new vertex to m different vertices already present in the network. To
exhibit preferential attachment, the probability $$\prod $$ with which a
new vertex will be connected to a vertex i depends on the connectivity
$$k_{i}$$ of that vertex, such that
$$\prod (k_{i}) = k_{i}/\sum \limits _{j}k_{j}$$. After t time steps the
model leads to a random network with $$t+m_{0}$$ vertices and mt edges.
This network is found to exhibit a power-law with exponent
$$2.9 \pm 0.1$$.

Due to preferential attachment, a vertex that acquired more connections than

another one will increase its connectivity at a higher rate, thus an initial
difference in the connectivity between two vertices will increase further as
the network grows. The rate at which a vertex acquires edges is
$$k_{i}/t = k_{i}/2t$$, which gives $$k_{i}(t) = m(t/t_{i})^{0.5}$$,
where $$t_{i}$$ is the time at which vertex i was added to the system.
Thus older (smaller $$t_{i}$$) vertices increase their connectivity at the
expense of the younger (larger $$t_{i}$$) ones, leading with time to some
vertices that are highly connected, thus exhibiting a “rich-get-richer”
phenomenon.

It is commonly known that the power-law distributions arise from decision-

making across a population in the presence of cascades.

We will create the following model concerning the presence of hyperlinks

between websites, to illustrate this:

1. 1.

Sites are created in order, and named $$1,2,3,\ldots ,N$$.

2. 2.

When site j is created, it produces a link to an earlier website according

to the following probabilistic rule (probability $$0 \le p \le 1$$).
 1. a.

With probability p, site j chooses a site i uniformly at random

among all earlier sites, and creates a link to this site i.

2. b.

With probability $$1-p$$, site j instead chooses a site i uniformly

at random from among all earlier sites, and creates a link to the site
that i points to.

3. 3.

This describes the creation of a single link from site j. One can
repeat this process to create multiple, independently generated
links from site j.

Step 2(b) is the key because site j is imitating the decision of site i. The main
result about this model is that if we run it for many sites, the fraction of sites
with k in-links will be distributed approximately according to a power law
$$1/k^{c}$$, where the value of the exponent c depends on the choice of
p. This dependence goes in an intuitive direction: as p gets smaller, so that
copying becomes more frequent, the exponent c gets smaller as well, making
one more likely to see extremely popular pages.

The process described in line 2(b) is an implementation of the rich-get-richer

or preferential attachment phenomenon. It is called the rich-get-richer
process because when j copies the decision of i, the probability of linking to
some site l is directly proportional to the total number of sites that currently
link to l. So, the probability that site l experiences an increase in popularity is
directly proportional to l’s current popularity. The term preferential
attachment is given because the links are formed preferentially to pages that
already have high popularity. Intuitively, this makes sense because the more
well-known some website is, the more likely that name comes up in other
websites, and hence it is more likely that websites will have a link to this
well-known website.

This rich-get-richer phenomenon is not confined to settings governed by

human-decision making. Instead the population of cities, the intensities of
earthquakes, the sizes of power outages, and the number of copies of a gene
in a genome are some instances of natural occurrences of this process.

Popularity distribution is found to have a long tail as shown in Fig. 11.2. This
shows some nodes which have very high popularity when compared to the
other nodes. This popularity however drops of to give a long set of nodes
who have more or less the same popularity. It is this latter set of a long list of
nodes which contribute to the long tail.

../images/462433_1_En_11_Chapter/462433_1_En_11_Fig2_HTML.
gif
Fig. 11.2

Distribution with a long tail

11.4 Analysis of Rich-Get-Richer Phenomenon

In this section, we will look at a heuristic argument that analyses the
behaviour of the model concerning the presence of hyperlinks between
websites presented in the previous section, to indicate why power law arises.
This will also show us how power law exponent c is related to more basic
features of the model.

Let the number of in-links to node j at time step $$t \in j$$ be a random
variable $$X_{j}(t)$$. The following two conditions exist for
$$X_{j}(t)$$:

1. 1.

Initial condition: Since node j has no links when first created at time j,
$$X_{j}(j) = 0$$.
 2. 2.
Expected change to $$X_{j}$$ over time: At time step $$t+1$$,
node j gains an in-link if and only if a link from this new created node
$$t+1$$ points to it. From step (2a) of the model, node $$t+1$$
links to j with probability 1 / t. From step (2b) of the model, node
$$t+1$$ links to j with probability $$X_{j}(t)/t$$ since at the
moment node $$t+1$$ was created, the total number of links in the
network was t and of these $$X_{j}(t)$$ point to j. Therefore, the
overall probability that node $$t+1$$ links to node j is as given in
Eq. 11.4.
$$\begin{aligned} \frac{p}{t} + \frac{(1-p)X_{j}(t)}{t}
\end{aligned}$$
(11.4)

However, this deals with the probabilistic case. For the deterministic case, we
define the time as continuously running from 0 to N instead of the
probabilistic case considered in the model. The function of time
$$X_{j}(t)$$ in the discrete case is approximated in the continuous case as
$$x_{j}(t)$$. The two properties of $$x_{j}(t)$$ are:

1. 1.

Initial condition: Since we had $$X_{j}(j) = 0$$ in the probabilistic

case, the deterministic case gets $$x_{j}(j) = 0$$.

2. 2.
Growth equation: In the probabilistic case, when node $$t+1$$
arrives, the number of in-links to j increases with probability given by
Eq. 11.4. In the deterministic approximation provided by $$x_{j}$$,
the rate of growth is modeled by the differential equation given in
Eq. 11.5.
$$\begin{aligned} \frac{dx_{j}}{dt} = \frac{p}{t} + \frac{(1-
p)x_{j}}{t} \end{aligned}$$
(11.5)

Let $$q = (1-p)$$ in Eq. 11.5, then

 $$\begin{aligned} \frac{dx_{j}}{dt} = \frac{p+qx_{j}}{t}
\end{aligned}$$
Dividing both sides by $$p+qx_{j}$$, we get
$$\begin{aligned} \frac{1}{p+qx_{j}}\frac{dx_{j}}{dt} = \frac{1}{t}
\end{aligned}$$
Integrating both sides
$$\begin{aligned} \int \frac{1}{p+qx_{j}}\frac{dx_{j}}{dt}dt = \int
\frac{1}{t}dt \end{aligned}$$
we get
$$\begin{aligned} ln(p+qx_{j}) = q\ ln\ t + c \end{aligned}$$
for some constant c. Taking $$A = e^{c}$$, we get
$$\begin{aligned} p+qx_{j} = At^{q} \end{aligned}$$
and hence
$$\begin{aligned} x_{j}(t) = \frac{1}{q}\left( At^{q}-p\right)
\end{aligned}$$
(11.6)
Using the initial condition, $$x_{j}(j) = 0$$ in Eq. 11.6, we get
$$\begin{aligned} 0 = x_{j}(j) = \frac{1}{q}\left( Aj^{q}-p\right)
\end{aligned}$$
and hence $$A = p/j^{q}$$. Substituting this value for A in Eq. 11.6, we
get
$$\begin{aligned} x_{j}(t) = \frac{1}{q}\left( \frac{p}{j^{q}}t^{q} -
p\right) = \frac{p}{q}\left[ \left( \frac{t}{j}\right) ^{q} - 1\right]
\end{aligned}$$
(11.7)
Now we ask the following question: For a given value of k, and time t, what
fraction of all nodes have atleast k in-links at time t? This can alternately be
formulated as: For a given value of k, and time t, what fraction of all
functions $$x_{j}$$ satisfy $$x_{j}(t) \ge k$$?
Equation 11.7 corresponds to the inequality
$$\begin{aligned} x_{j}(t) = \frac{1}{q}\left[ \left( \frac{t}{j}\right) ^{q}
- 1\right] \ge k \end{aligned}$$
This can be re-written as
$$\begin{aligned} j \le \frac{1}{t}\left[ \frac{q}{p} \cdot k + 1\right] ^{-
\frac{1}{q}} \end{aligned}$$
we get
 $$\begin{aligned} \frac{1}{t} \cdot t\left[ \frac{q}{p} \cdot k + 1\right]
^{-\frac{1}{q}} = \left[ \frac{q}{p} \cdot k + 1\right] ^{-\frac{1}{q}}
\end{aligned}$$
(11.8)
Since p and q are constants, the expression inside brackets is proportional to
k and so the fraction of $$x_{j}$$ that are atleast k is proportional to
$$k^{-1/q}$$.
Differentiating Eq. 11.8, we get
$$\begin{aligned} \frac{1}{q}\frac{q}{p}\left[ \frac{q}{p} \cdot k +
1\right] ^{-1-1/q} \end{aligned}$$
From this, we can infer that the deterministic model predicts that the fraction
of nodes with k in-links is proportional to $$k^{-(1+1/q)}$$ with exponent
$$\begin{aligned} 1 + \frac{1}{q} = 1 + \frac{1}{p} \end{aligned}$$
With high probability over the random formation of links, fraction of nodes
with k in-links is proportional to $$k^{(-1+1/(1-p)}$$. When p is close to
1, the link formation is mainly based on uniform random choices, and so the
rich-get-richer dynamics is muted. On the other hand, when p is close to 0,
the growth of the network is strongly governed by rich-get-richer behaviour,
and the power-law exponent decreases towards 2, allowing for many nodes
with a very large number of in-links. The fact that 2 is a natural limit for the
exponent as rich-get-richer dynamics become stronger also provides a nice
way to think about the fact that many power-law exponents in real networks
tend to be slightly above 2.

11.5 Modelling Burst of Activity

Reference [10] developed a formal approach for modelling “bursts of
activity” , the phenomenon where the appearance of a topic in a document
stream grows in intensity for a period of time and then fades away. These
bursts show certain features rising sharply in frequency as the topic emerges.
Here, an organizational framework for robustly and efficiently identifying
and analysing the content is developed. The approach is based on modelling
the stream using an infinite-state automaton, in which bursts appear naturally
as state transitions.

Suppose we are given a document stream, how do we identify the bursts of

activity in the stream? On first thought, it would occur that bursts correspond
to points at which the intensity of activity increases sharply. However, this
intensity does not rise smoothly to a crescendo and then fall away, but rather
exhibits frequent alternations of rapid flurries and longer pauses when
examined closely. Thus, methods that analyse gaps between consecutive
message arrivals in too simplistic a way can easily be pulled into identifying
large numbers of short spurious bursts, as well as fragmenting long bursts
into many smaller ones. It is worth noting that the intent is to extract global
structure from a robust kind of data reduction, i.e, identifying bursts only
when they have sufficient intensity, and in a way that allows a burst to persist
smoothly across a fairly non-uniform pattern of message arrivals.

This paper models the generation of bursts by an automaton that is in one of

two states, “low” and “high”. The time gaps between consecutive events are
distributed according to an exponential distribution whose parameter depend
on the current state of the automaton. Thus, the high state is hypothesized as
generating bursts of events. There is a cost associated with any state
transition to discourage short bursts. Given a document stream, the goal is to
find a low cost sequence that is likely to generate that stream. Finding an
optimal solution to this problem is accomplished by dynamic programming.

In the case where each event in a stream is either relevant or irrelevant , this
two-state model can be extended to generate events with a particular mix of
these relevant and irrelevant events according to a binomial distribution. A
sequence of events is considered bursty if the fraction of relevant events
alternates between periods in which it is large and long periods in which it is
small. Associating a weight with each burst, solves the problem of
enumerating all the bursts by order of weight.

Reference [11] identify bursts in the Blogspace and propose techniques to

generate bursty intra-community links.

It was found that within a community of interacting bloggers, a given topic

may become the subject of intense debate for a period of time, then fade
away. Simply identifying the bloggers contributing to this burst is not
enough, the corresponding time interval of activity is also a requirement.

The paper uses a graph object called the time graph . A time graph
$$G = (V,E)$$ consists of
 1. 1.

A set V of vertices where each vertex $$v \in V$$ has an associated
interval D(v) on the time axis called the duration of v.

2. 2.

A set E of edges where each edge $$e \in E$$ is a triplet (u, v, t)
where u and v are vertices in V and t is a point in time in the interval
$$D(u) \cap D(v)$$.

A vertex v is said to be alive at time t if $$t \in D(v)$$. This means that
each edge is created at a point in time at which its two endpoints are alive.

Thus, tracking bursty communities on the Blogspace involves the following

two steps:

1. 1.

Identify dense subgraphs in the time graph of the Blogspace which will
correspond to all potential communities. However, this will result in
finding all the clusters regardless of whether or not they are bursty.

2. 2.

Apply the work of [10] to perform burst analysis of each subgraph

obtained in the previous step.

The time graph was generated for blogs from seven blog sites. The resulting
graph consisted of 22299 vertices, 70472 unique edges and 777653 edges
counting multiplicity. Applying the steps to this graph, the burstiness of the
graph is as shown in Fig. 11.3.
 ../images/462433_1_En_11_Chapter/462433_1_En_11_Fig3_HTML.
gif
Fig. 11.3

Burstiness of communities in the time graph of the Blogspace

11.6 Densification Power Laws and Shrinking

Diameters
Reference [13] studied temporal graphs and found that most of these graphs
densify over time with the number of edges growing superlinearly in the
number of nodes. Also, the average distance between nodes is found to
shrink over time.

It was observed that as graphs evolve over time,

$$\begin{aligned} |E|(t) \propto |V|(t)^{a} \end{aligned}$$
(11.9)
where |E|(t) and |V|(t) denote the number of vertices and edges at time step t
and a is an exponent that generally lies between 1 and 2. This relation is
referred to as the Densification power-law or growth power-law .

Twelve different datasets from seven different sources were considered for
the study. These included HEP-PH and HEP-TH arXiv citation graphs, a
citation graph for U.S. utility patents, a graph of routers comprising the
Internet, five bipartite affiliation graphs of authors with papers they authored
for ASTRO-PH, HEP-TH, HEP-PH, COND-MAT and GR-QC, a bipartite
graph of actors-to-movies corresponding to IMDB, a person to person
recommendation graph, and an email communication network from an
European research institution.

Figure 11.4 depicts the plot of average out-degree over time. We observe an
increase indicating that graphs become dense. Figure 11.5 illustrates the log-
log plot of the number of edges as a function of the number of vertices. They
all obey the densification power law. This could mean that densification of
graphs is an intrinsic phenomenon.
 ../images/462433_1_En_11_Chapter/462433_1_En_11_Fig4_HTML.
gif
Fig. 11.4

Average out-degree over time. Increasing trend signifies that the

graph are densifying

../images/462433_1_En_11_Chapter/462433_1_En_11_Fig5_HTML.
gif
Fig. 11.5

Number of edges as a function of the number of nodes in log-log

scale. They obey the densification power law

In this paper, for every $$d \in \mathbb {N}$$, g(d) denotes the fraction of
connected node pairs whose shortest connecting path has length atmost d.
The effective diameter of the network is defined as the value of d at which
this function g(d) achieves the value 0.9. So, if D is a value where
$$g(D) = 0.9$$, then the graph has effective diameter D. Figure 11.6 shows
the effective diameter over time. A decrease in diameter can be observed
from the plots. Since all of these plots exhibited a decrease in the diameter, it
could be that the shrinkage was an inherent property of networks.

../images/462433_1_En_11_Chapter/462433_1_En_11_Fig6_HTML.
gif
Fig. 11.6

Effective diameter over time for 6 different datasets. There is a

consistent decrease of the diameter over time

To verify that the shrinkage of diameters was not intrinsic to the datasets,
experiments were performed to account for:

1. 1.

Possible sampling problems: Since computing shortest paths among all

node pairs is computationally prohibitive for these graphs, several
different approximate methods were applied, obtaining almost identical
results from all of them.
2. 2.

Effect of disconnected components: These large graphs have a single

giant component. To see if the disconnected components had a bearing
on the diameter, the effective diameter for the entire graph and just the
giant component were computed. The values were found to be the same.

3. 3.

Effects of missing past: With almost any dataset, one does not have data
reaching all the way back to the network’s birth. This is referred to as
the problem of missing past . This means that there will be edges
pointing to nodes prior to the beginning of the observation period. Such
nodes and edges are referred to as phantom nodes and phantom edges
respectively.

To understand how the diameters of our networks are affected by this

unavoidable problem, we perform the following test. We pick some
positive time $$t_{0} > 0$$ and determine what the diameter
would look like as a function of time if this were the beginning of our
data. We then put back in the nodes and the edges from before time
$$t_{0}$$ and study how much the diameters change. If this change
is small, then it provides evidence that the missing past is not
influencing the overall result. $$t_{0}$$ were suitably set for the
datasets and the results of three measurements were compared:
1. a.

Diameter of full graph: For each time t, the effective diameter of

the graph’s giant component was computed.

2. b.

Post- $$t_{0}$$ subgraph: The effective diameter of the post-

$$t_{0}$$ subgraph using all nodes and edges were computed.
For each time $$t (t > t_{0})$$, a graph using all nodes dated
before t was created. The effective diameter of the subgraph of the
 nodes dated between $$t_{0}$$ and t was computed. To compute
the effective diameter, we can use all edges and nodes (including
those dated before $$t_{0}$$). This means that we are measuring
distances only among nodes dated between $$t_{0}$$ and t
while also using nodes and edges before $$t_{0}$$ as shortcuts
or bypasses. The experiment measures the diameter of the graph if
we knew the full (pre- $$t_{0}$$) past, the citations of the papers
which we have intentionally excluded for this test.

3. c.

Post- $$t_{0}$$ subgraph, no past. We set $$t_{0}$$ the same

way as in the previous experiment, but then, for all nodes dated
before $$t_{0}$$, we delete all their outlinks. This creates the
graph we would have gotten if we had started collecting data only
at time $$t_{0}$$.

In Fig. 11.6, we superimpose the effective diameters using the three

different techniques. If the missing past does not play a large role
in the diameter, then all three curves should lie close to one
another. We observe this is the case for the arXiv citation graphs.
For the arXiv paper-author affiliation graph and for the patent
citation graph, the curves are quite different right at the cut-off time
$$t_{0}$$, but they quickly align with one another. As a result, it
seems clear that the continued decreasing trend in the effective
diameter as time runs to the present is not the result of these
boundary effects.

4. 4.

Emergence of the giant component: We have learnt in Chap. 3 that in the

Erdös-Rényi random graph model, the diameter of the giant component
is quite large when it first appears, and then it shrinks as edges continue
to be added. Therefore, are shrinking diameters a symptom of the
emergence of giant component?
 Figure 11.7 shows us that this is not the case. In the plot of the size of
the GCC for the full graph and for a graph where we had no past, i.e,
where we delete all outlinks of the nodes dated before the cut-off time
$$t_{0}$$. Because we delete the outlinks of the pre- $$t_{0}$$
nodes, the size of the GCC is smaller, but, as the graph grows, the effect
of these deleted links becomes negligible.

Within a few years, the giant component accounts for almost all the
nodes in the graph. The effective diameter, however, continues to
steadily decrease beyond this point. This indicates that the decrease is
happening in a mature graph and not because many small disconnected
components are being rapidly glued together.

../images/462433_1_En_11_Chapter/462433_1_En_11_Fig7_HTML.
gif
Fig. 11.7

The fraction of nodes that are part of the giant connected

component over time. Observe that after 4 years, $$90\%$$ of all
nodes in the graph belong to the giant component

The models studied so far do not exhibit this densification and diameter
shrinkage. The paper proposes the following models which can achieve these
properties. The first model is the Community Guided Attachment where the
idea is that if the nodes of a graph belong to communities-within-
communities [6], and if the cost for cross-community edges is scale-free,
then the densification power-law follows naturally. Also, this model exhibits
a heavy-tailed degree distribution. However, this model cannot capture the
shrinking effective diameters. To capture all of these, the Forest Fire model
was proposed. In this model, nodes arrive in over time. Each node has a
center-of-gravity in some part of the network and its probability of linking to
other nodes decreases rapidly with their distance from this center-of-gravity.
However, occasionally a new node will produce a very large number of
outlinks. Such nodes will help cause a more skewed out-degree distribution.
These nodes will serve as bridges that connect formerly disparate parts of the
network, bringing the diameter down.
Formally, the forest fire model has two parameters, a forward burning
probability p , and a backward burning probability r . Consider a node v
joining the network at time $$t > 1$$, and let $$G_{t}$$ be the graph
constructed thus far. Node v forms outlinks to nodes in $$G_{t}$$
according to the following process:

1. 1.

v first chooses an ambassador node w uniformly at random and forms a

link to w.

2. 2.

Two random numbers, x and y are generated, that are geometrically

distributed with means $$p/(1 - p)$$ and $$rp/(1 - rp)$$,
respectively. Node v selects x out-links and y in-links of w incident to
nodes that were not yet visited. Let $$w_{1}$$, $$w_{2}$$,
$$\ldots $$, $$w_{x+y}$$ denotes the other ends of these selected
links. If not enough in- or out-links are available, v selects as many as it
can.

3. 3.

v forms out-links to $$w_{1}$$, $$w_{2}$$, $$\ldots $$,

$$w_{x+y}$$, and then applies the previous step recursively to each
of $$w_{1}$$, $$w_{2}$$, $$\ldots $$, $$w_{x+y}$$. As the
process continues, nodes cannot be visited a second time, preventing the
construction from cycling.

Thus, the burning of links in the Forest Fire model begins at w, spreads to
$$w_{1}$$, $$\ldots $$, $$w_{x+y}$$, and proceeds recursively until
it dies out. The model can be extended to account for isolated vertices and
vertices with large degree by having newcomers choose no ambassadors in
the former case (called orphans ) and multiple ambassadors in the latter case
(simply called multiple ambassadors ). Orphans and multiple ambassadors
help further separate the diameter decrease/increase boundary from the
densification transition and so widen the region of parameter space for which
the model produces reasonably sparse graphs with decreasing effective
diameters.

Reference [12] proposed an affiliation network framework to generate

models that exhibit these phenomena. Their intuition is that individuals are
part of a certain society, therefore leading to a bipartite graph. By folding this
bipartite graph B, the resultant folded graph G is found to exhibit the
following properties:

B has power-law distribution, and G has a heavy-tailed distribution.

G has super-linear number of edges.

The effective diameter of G stabilizes to a constant.

11.7 Microscopic Evolution of Networks

Reference [14] proposed the use of model likelihood of individual edges as a
way to evaluate and compare various network evolution models.

The following datasets were considered: (i) FLICKR (a photo- sharing

website), (ii) DELICIOUS (a collaborative bookmark tagging website), (iii)
YAHOO! ANSWERS (a knowledge sharing website), and (iv) LINKEDIN (a
professional contacts website). Here, nodes represent people and edges
represent social relationships. These datasets were considered particularly
because they have the exact temporal information about individual arrival of
nodes and edges. Thereby, we are able to consider edge-by-edge evolution of
networks, and hence efficiently compute the likelihood that a particular
model would have produced a particular edge, given the current state of the
network.

There are three core processes to the models: (i) Node arrival process : This
governs the arrival of new nodes into the network, (ii) Edge initiation process
: Determines for each node when it will initiate a new edge, and (iii) Edge
destination selection process : Determines the destination of a newly initiated
edge.
Let $$G_{t}$$ denote a network composed from the earliest t edges,
$$e_{1}$$, $$\ldots $$, $$e_{t}$$ for $$t \in \{1, \ldots , |E|\}$$. Let
$$t_{e}$$ be the time when edge e is created, let t(u) be the time when the
node u joined the network, and let $$t_{k}(u)$$ be the time when the
$$k^{th}$$ edge of the node u is created. Then $$a_{t}(u) = t - t(u)$$
denotes the age of the node u at time t. Let $$d_{t}(u)$$ denote the degree
of the node u at time t and $$d(u) = d_{T}(u)$$. $$[\cdot ]$$ denotes a
predicate (takes value of 1 if expression is true, else 0).

The maximum likelihood estimation (MLE) was applied to pick the best
model in the following manner: the network is evolved in an edge by edge
manner, and for every edge that arrives into this network, the likelihood that
the particular edge endpoints would be chosen under some model is
measured. The product of these likelihoods over all edges will give the
likelihood of the model. A higher likelihood means a better model in the
sense that it offers a more likely explanation of the observed data.

11.7.1 Edge Destination Selection Process

By the preferential attachment (PA) model, the probability $$p_{e}(d)$$

that a new edge chooses a destination node of degree d, normalized by the
number of nodes of degree d that exist just before this step is computed as
$$\begin{aligned} p_{e}(d) = \frac{\sum \limits _{t}[e_{t}=(u,v)\wedge
d_{t-1}(v)=d]}{\sum \limits _{t}|\{u:d_{t-1}(u)=d\}|} \end{aligned}$$
(11.10)
Figure 11.8 shows the plot of $$p_{e}(d)$$ as a function of the node
degree d. Figure 11.8a, b are for an Erdös-Rényi random graph and a
preferential attachment model respectively. Figure 11.8c–f are for the
datasets. Observe that they all follow $$p_{e}(d) \propto d^{\tau }$$
where the exponent $$\tau \approx 1$$ for all plots except the first.

../images/462433_1_En_11_Chapter/462433_1_En_11_Fig8_HTML.
gif
Fig. 11.8

Probability $$p_{e}(d)$$ of a new edge e choosing a destination

at a node of degree d
The average number of edges, e(a), created by nodes of age a, is the number
of edges created by nodes of age a normalized by the number of nodes that
achieved age a given in Eq. 11.11
$$\begin{aligned} e(a) = \frac{|\{e=(u,v):t(e)-t(u)=a\}|}{|\{t(u):t_{l}-
t(u)\ge a\}|} \end{aligned}$$
(11.11)
where $$t_{l}$$ is the time when the last node in the network joined.
Figure 11.9 plots the fraction of edges initiated by nodes of a certain age. The
spike at nodes of age 0 correspond to the people who receive an invite to join
the network, create a first edge, and then never come back.

../images/462433_1_En_11_Chapter/462433_1_En_11_Fig9_HTML.
gif
Fig. 11.9

Average number of edges created by a node of age a

Using the MLE principle, the combined effect of node age and degree was
studied by considering the following four parameterised models for choosing
the edge endpoints at time t.

D: The probability of selecting a node v is proportional to its current

degree raised to power $$\tau : d_{t}(v)^{\tau }$$.

DR: With probability $$\tau $$, the node v is selected preferentially

(proportionally to its degree), and with probability $$(1 - \tau )$$,
uniformly at random: $$\tau \cdot d_{t}(v) + (1 - \tau ) \cdot 1/N(t)$$.

A: The probability of selecting a node is proportional to its age raised to

power $$\tau : a_{t}(v)^{\tau }$$.

DA: The probability of selecting a node v is proportional the product of

its current degree and its age raised to the power
$$\tau : d_{t}(v)\cdot a_{t}(v)^{\tau }$$.

Figure 11.10 plots the log-likelihood under the different models as a function
of $$\tau $$. The red curve plots the log-likelihood of selecting a source
node and the green curve for selecting the destination node of an edge.
 ../images/462433_1_En_11_Chapter/462433_1_En_11_Fig10_HTML.
gif
Fig. 11.10

Log-likelihood of an edge selecting its source and destination node.

Arrows denote $$\tau $$ at highest likelihood

In FLICKR the selection of destination is purely preferential: model D

achieves the maximum likelihood at $$\tau = 1$$, and model DA is very
biased to model D, i.e, $$\tau \approx 1$$. Model A has worse likelihood
but model DA improves the overall log-likelihood by around $$10\%$$.
Edge attachment in DELICIOUS seems to be the most “random”: model D
has worse likelihood than model DR. Moreover the likelihood of model DR
achieves maximum at $$\tau = 0.5$$ suggesting that about $$50\%$$ of
the DELICIOUS edges attach randomly. Model A has better likelihood than
the degree-based models, showing edges are highly biased towards young
nodes. For YAHOO! ANSWERS, models D, A, and DR have roughly equal
likelihoods (at the optimal choice of $$\tau $$), while model DA further
improves the log-likelihood by $$20\%$$, showing some age bias. In
LINKEDIN, age-biased models are worse than degree-biased models. A
strong degree preferential bias of the edges was also noted. As in FLICKR,
model DA improves the log-likelihood by $$10\%$$.

Selecting an edge’s destination node is harder than selecting its source (the
green curve is usually below the red). Also, selecting a destination appears
more random than selecting a source, the maximum likelihood $$\tau $$ of
the destination node (green curve) for models D and DR is shifted to the left
when compared to the source node (red), which means the degree bias is
weaker. Similarly, there is a stronger bias towards young nodes in selecting
an edge’s source than in selecting its destination. Based on the observations,
model D performs reasonably well compared to more sophisticated variants
based on degree and age.

Even though the analysis suggests that model D is a reasonable model for
edge destination selection, it is inherently “non-local” in that edges are no
more likely to form between nodes which already have friends in common. A
detailed study of the locality properties of edge destination selection is
required.
Consider the following notion of edge locality: for each new edge (u, w), the
number of hops it spans are measured, i.e., the length of the shortest path
between nodes u and w immediately before the edge was created.
Figure 11.11 shows the distribution of these shortest path values induced by
each new edge for $$G_{np}$$ (with $$p = 12/n$$), PA, and the four
social networks. (The isolated dot on the left counts the number of edges that
connected previously disconnected components of the network). For
$$G_{np}$$ most new edges span nodes that were originally six hops
away, and then the number decays polynomially in the hops. In the PA
model, we see a lot of long-range edges; most of them span four hops but
none spans more than seven. The hop distributions corresponding to the four
real-world networks look similar to one another, and strikingly different from
both $$G_{np}$$ and PA. The number of edges decays exponentially with
the hop distance between the nodes, meaning that most edges are created
locally between nodes that are close. The exponential decay suggests that the
creation of a large fraction of edges can be attributed to locality in the
network structure, namely most of the times people who are close in the
network (e.g., have a common friend) become friends themselves. These
results involve counting the number of edges that link nodes certain distance
away. In a sense, this over counts edges (u, w) for which u and w are far
away, as there are many more distant candidates to choose from, it appears
that the number of long-range edges decays exponentially while the number
of long-range candidates grows exponentially. To explore this phenomenon,
the number of hops each new edge spans are counted but then normalized by
the total number of nodes at h hops, i.e, we compute
$$\begin{aligned} p_{e}(h) = \frac{\sum \limits _{t}[e_{t}\ connects\
nodes\ at\ distance\ h\ in\ G_{t-1}]}{\sum \limits _{t}(\#\ nodes\ at\ distance\
h\ from\ the\ source\ node\ of\ e_{t})} \end{aligned}$$
(11.12)
First, Fig. 11.12a, b show the results for $$G_{np}$$ and PA models.
(Again, the isolated dot at $$h = 0$$ plots the probability of a new edge
connecting disconnected components.) In $$G_{np}$$, edges are created
uniformly at random, and so the probability of linking is independent of the
number of hops between the nodes. In PA, due to degree correlations short
(local) edges prevail. However, a non-trivial amount of probability goes to
edges that span more than two hops. Figure 11.12c–f show the plots for the
four networks. Notice the probability of linking to a node h hops away
decays double-exponentially, i.e., $$p_{e}(h) \propto exp(exp(-h))$$, since
the number of edges at h hops increases exponentially with h. This behaviour
is drastically different from both the PA and $$G_{np}$$ models. Also
note that almost all of the probability mass is on edges that close length-two
paths. This means that edges are most likely to close triangles, i.e, connect
people with common friends.

../images/462433_1_En_11_Chapter/462433_1_En_11_Fig11_HTML.
gif
Fig. 11.11

Number of edges $$E_{h}$$ created to nodes h hops away.

$$h = 0$$ counts the number of edges that connected previously
disconnected components

../images/462433_1_En_11_Chapter/462433_1_En_11_Fig12_HTML.
gif
Fig. 11.12

Probability of linking to a random node at h hops from source

node. Value at $$h = 0$$ hops is for edges that connect
previously disconnected components

11.7.2 Edge Initiation Process

Here, we assume that the sequence and timing of node arrivals is given, and
we model the process by which nodes initiate edges. We begin by studying
how long a node remains active in the social network, and then during this
active lifetime, we study the specific times at which the node initiates new
edges.

To avoid truncation effects, we only consider those nodes whose last-created

edge is in the first half of all edges in the data. Recall that the lifetime of a
node u is $$a(u) = t_{d(u)}(u) - t_{1}(u)$$. We evaluate the likelihood of
various distributions and observe that node lifetimes are best modeled by an
exponential distribution, $$p_{l}(a) = \lambda exp(-\lambda a)$$.
Figure 11.13 gives the plot of the data and the exponential fits, where time is
measured in days. We find that the exponential distribution does not fit well
the nodes with very short lifetimes, i.e, nodes that are invited into the
network, create an edge and never return. But the distribution provides a very
clean fit for nodes whose lifetime is more than a week.

../images/462433_1_En_11_Chapter/462433_1_En_11_Fig13_HTML.
gif
Fig. 11.13

Exponentially distributed node lifetimes

Now that we have a model for the lifetime of a node u, we must model that
amount of elapsed time between edge initiations from u. Let
$$\delta _{u}(d) = t_{d+1}(u) - t_{d}(u)$$ be the time it takes for the node
u with current degree d to create its $$(d+1)$$-st out-edge; we call
$$\delta _{u}(d)$$ the edge gap. Again, we examine several candidate
distributions to model edge gaps. The best likelihood is provided by a power
law with exponential cut-off:
$$p_{g}(\delta (d);\alpha ,\beta ) \propto \delta (d)^{-\alpha } exp(-\beta
\delta (d))$$
, where d is the current degree of the node. These results are confirmed in
Fig. 11.14, in which we plot the MLE estimates to gap distribution
$$\delta (1)$$, i.e., distribution of times that it took a node of degree 1 to
add the second edge. We find that all gaps distributions $$\delta (d)$$ are
best modelled by a power law with exponential cut-off. For each
$$\delta (d)$$ we fit a separate distribution and Fig. 11.15 shows the
evolution of the parameters $$\alpha $$ and $$\beta $$ of the gap
distribution, as a function of the degree d of the node. Interestingly, the
power law exponent $$\alpha (d)$$ remains constant as a function of d, at
almost the same value for all four networks. On the other hand, the
exponential cutoff parameter $$\beta (d)$$ increases linearly with d, and
varies by an order of magnitude across networks; this variation models the
extent to which the “rich get richer” phenomenon manifests in each network.
This means that the slope $$\alpha $$ of power-law part remains constant,
only the exponential cutoff part (parameter $$\beta $$) starts to kick in
sooner and sooner. So, nodes add their $$(d + 1)$$-st edge faster than their
dth edge, i.e, nodes start to create more and more edges (sleeping times get
shorter) as they get older (and have higher degree). So, based on Fig. 11.15,
the overall gap distribution can be modelled by
 $$p_{g}(\delta |d;\alpha ,\beta ) \propto \delta ^{-\alpha } exp(-\beta d
\delta )$$
.

../images/462433_1_En_11_Chapter/462433_1_En_11_Fig14_HTML.
gif
Fig. 11.14

Edge gap distribution for a node to obtain the second edge,

$$\delta (1)$$, and MLE power law with exponential cutoff fits

Fig. 11.15

Evolution of the $$\alpha $$ and $$\beta $$ parameters with

the current node degree d. $$\alpha $$ remains constant, and
$$\beta $$ linearly increases

11.7.3 Node Arrival Process

Figure 11.16 shows the number of users in each of our networks over time.
FLICKR grows exponentially over much of our network, while the growth of
other networks is much slower. DELICIOUS grows slightly super-linearly,
LINKEDIN quadratically, and YAHOO! ANSWERS sub-linearly. Given these
wild variations we conclude the node arrival process needs to be specified in
advance as it varies greatly across networks due to external factors.

../images/462433_1_En_11_Chapter/462433_1_En_11_Fig16_HTML.
gif
Fig. 11.16

Number of nodes over time

11.7.4 Network Evolution Model

From the observations so far, we now present a complete network evolution

model. The model is parametrized by $$N(\cdot )$$, $$\lambda $$,
$$\alpha $$, $$\beta $$, and operates as follows:

1. 1.

Nodes arrive using the node arrival function $$N(\cdot )$$.

2. 2.

Node u arrives and samples its lifetime a from the exponential

distribution $$p_{l}(a) = \lambda exp(-\lambda a)$$.

3. 3.

Node u adds the first edge to node v with probability proportional to its
degree.

4. 4.

A node u with degree d samples a time gap $$\delta $$ from the

distribution
$$p_{g}(\delta |d;\alpha ,\beta ) = (1/Z)\delta ^{-\alpha }exp(-\beta d
\delta )$$
and goes to sleep for $$\delta $$ time steps.

5. 5.

When a node wakes up, if its lifetime has not expired yet, it creates a
two-hop edge using the random-random triangle-closing model.

6. 6.
 If a node’s lifetime has expired, then it stops adding edges; otherwise it
repeats from step 4.

Problems
Given that the probability density function (PDF) of a power-law distribution
is given by Eq. 11.13.
$$\begin{aligned} P(X=x) = \frac{\alpha -1}{x_{min}}\left( \frac{x}
{x_{min}}\right) ^{-\alpha } \end{aligned}$$
(11.13)
where $$x_{min}$$ is the minimum value that X can take.

60

Derive an expression of $$P(X\ge x)$$, the Complementary Cumulative

Distribution Function (CCDF), in terms of $$\alpha $$.

61

Show how to generate a random sample from the power-law distribution

using the CCDF derived and a uniform random sample $$u \sim U(0,1)$$.

62

Using this sampling technique, create a dataset of 10000 samples following

the power-law distribution with exponent $$\alpha =2$$ and
$$x_{min}=1$$. Plot the empirical distribution on a log-log scale by first
rounding each sample to the nearest integer and then plotting the empirical
PDF over these rounded values. Also plot the true probability density
function for the power law (this will help verify that the data was generated
correctly).

References

1. 1.
 Aiello, William, Fan Chung, and Linyuan Lu. 2002. Random evolution
in massive graphs. In Handbook of massive data sets, 97–122. Berlin:
Springer.
2. 2.
Barabási, Albert-László, and Réka Albert. 1999. Emergence of scaling
in random networks. Science 286 (5439): 509–512.MathSciNetCrossref
3. 3.
Bollobás, Béla, Christian Borgs, Jennifer Chayes, and Oliver Riordan.
2003. Directed scale-free graphs. In Proceedings of the fourteenth
annual ACM-SIAM symposium on discrete algorithms, 132–139.
Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics.
4. 4.
Brookes, Bertram C. 1969. Bradford’s law and the bibliography of
science. Nature 224 (5223): 953.Crossref
5. 5.
Clauset, Aaron, Cosma Rohilla Shalizi, and Mark E.J. Newman. 2009.
Power-law distributions in empirical data. SIAM Review 51 (4): 661–
703.
6. 6.
Fractals, Chaos. 1991. Power laws: Minutes from an infinite paradise.
7. 7.
Goel, Sharad, Andrei Broder, Evgeniy Gabrilovich, and Bo Pang. 2010.
Anatomy of the long tail: Ordinary people with extraordinary tastes. In
Proceedings of the third ACM international conference on Web search
and data mining, 201–210. ACM.
8. 8.
Grünwald, Peter D. 2007. The minimum description length principle.
Cambridge: MIT press.
9. 9.
Kass, Robert E., and Adrian E. Raftery. 1995. Bayes factors. Journal of
the American Statistical Association 90 (430): 773–795.
10. 10.
Kleinberg, Jon. 2003. Bursty and hierarchical structure in streams. Data
Mining and Knowledge Discovery 7 (4): 373–397.MathSciNetCrossref
11. 11.
Kumar, Ravi, Jasmine Novak, Prabhakar Raghavan, and Andrew
Tomkins. 2005. On the bursty evolution of blogspace. World Wide Web
8 (2): 159–178.Crossref
12. 12.
Lattanzi, Silvio, and D. Sivakumar. 2009. Affiliation networks. In
Proceedings of the forty-first annual ACM symposium on Theory of
computing, 427–434. ACM.
13. 13.
Leskovec, Jure, Jon Kleinberg, and Christos Faloutsos. 2007. Graph
evolution: Densification and shrinking diameters. ACM Transactions on
Knowledge Discovery from Data (TKDD) 1 (1): 2.Crossref
14. 14.
Leskovec, Jure, Lars Backstrom, Ravi Kumar, and Andrew Tomkins.
2008. Microscopic evolution of social networks. In Proceedings of the
14th ACM SIGKDD international conference on Knowledge discovery
and data mining, 462–470. ACM.
15. 15.
Lotka, Alfred J. 1926. The frequency distribution of scientific
productivity. Journal of the Washington Academy of Sciences 16 (12):
317–323.
16. 16.
Mandelbrot, Benoit. 1960. The pareto-levy law and the distribution of
income. International Economic Review 1 (2): 79–106.Crossref
17. 17.
Stone, Mervyn. 1977. An asymptotic equivalence of choice of model by
cross-validation and Akaike’s criterion. Journal of the Royal Statistical
Society. Series B (Methodological) 39: 44–47.
© Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2018
Krishna Raj P.M., Ankith Mohan and K.G. Srinivasa, Practical Social Network Analysis with Python,
Computer Communications and Networks
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-96746-2_12

12. Kronecker Graphs

Krishna Raj P. M.1 , Ankith Mohan1 and K. G. Srinivasa2

(1) Department of ISE, Ramaiah Institute of Technology, Bangalore,

Karnataka, India
(2) Department of Information Technology, C.B.P. Government
Engineering College, Jaffarpur, Delhi, India

Krishna Raj P. M.
Email: krishnarajpm@gmail.com

The graph models that we have learnt heretofore cater to specific network
properties. We need a graph generator that can produce the long list of
properties. These generated graphs can be used for simulations, scenarios
and extrapolation, and the graphs draw a boundary over what properties to
realistically focus on. Reference [4] proposed that such a realistic graph is
the Kronecker graph which is generated using the Kronecker product.
The idea behind these Kronecker graphs is to create self-similar graphs
recursively. Beginning with an initiator graph $$G_{1}$$, with
$$|V|_{1}$$ vertices and $$|E|_{1}$$ edges, produce
successively larger graphs $$G_{2}, \dots , G_{n}$$ such that the kth
graph $$G_{k}$$ is on $$|V|_{k} = |V|_{1}^{k}$$ vertices. To
exhibit the densification power-law, $$G_{k}$$ should have
$$|E|_{k} = |E|_{1}^{k}$$ edges. The Kronecker product of two
matrices generates this recursive self-similar graphs.
Given two matrices $$A = [a_{i,j}]$$ and B of sizes
$$n \times m$$ and $$n' \times m'$$ respectively, the
Kronecker product matrix C of size $$(n*n') \times (m*m')$$ is given
by Eq. 12.1.
$$\begin{aligned} C = A \otimes B = \left( \begin{matrix}
a_{1,1}B &{} a_{1,2}B &{} \dots &{} a_{1,m}B \\
a_{2,1}B &{} a_{2,2}B &{} \dots &{} a_{2,m}B \\ (12.1)
\vdots &{} \vdots &{} \ddots &{} \vdots \\ a_{n,1}B
&{} a_{n,2}B &{} \dots &{} a_{n,m}B \\
\end{matrix} \right) \end{aligned}$$
So, the Kronecker product of two graphs is the Kronecker product of their
adjacency matrices.
In a Kronecker graph, $$Edge(X_{ij},X_{kl}) \in G \otimes H$$
iff $$(X_{i},X_{k}) \in G$$ and $$(X_{j},X_{l}) \in H$$
where $$X_{ij}$$ and $$X_{kl}$$ are vertices in
$$G \otimes H$$, and $$X_{i}, X_{j}, X_{k}$$ and
$$X_{l}$$ are the corresponding vertices in G and H.
Figure 12.1 shows the recursive construction of $$G \otimes H$$,
when $$G = H$$ is a 3-node path.

../images/462433_1_En_12_Chapter/462433_1_En_12_Fig1_HTML.gif
Fig. 12.1 Top: a “3-chain” and its Kronecker product with itself; each of the $$X_{i}$$ nodes
gets expanded into 3 nodes, which are then linked. Bottom: the corresponding adjacency matrices,
along with the matrix for the fourth Kronecker power $$G_{4}$$

The kth power of $$G_{1}$$ is defined as the matrix

$$G_{1}^{[k]}$$ (abbreviated to $$G_{k}$$), such that:
$$\begin{aligned} G_{1}^{[k]} = G_{k} = \underbrace{G_{1}
\otimes G_{1} \otimes \dots G_{1}}_{k\ times} = G_{k-1} \otimes (12.2)
G_{1} \end{aligned}$$
The self-similar nature of the Kronecker graph product is clear: To produce
$$G_{k}$$ from $$G_{k-1}$$, we “expand” (replace) each
node of $$G_{k-1}$$ by converting it into a copy of G, and we join
these copies together according to the adjacencies in $$G_{k-1}$$
(see Fig. 12.1). This process is intuitive: one can imagine it as positing that
communities with the graph grow recursively, with nodes in the community
recursively getting expanded into miniature copies of the community.
Nodes in the subcommunity then link among themselves and also to nodes
from different communities.
Kronecker graphs satisfy the following properties. The proofs for these
theorems can be found in [4] or [5].

Theorem 20 Kronecker graphs have multinomial degree

distributions, for both in- and out-degrees.

Theorem 21 Kronecker graphs have a multinomial distribution for

its eigenvalues.

Theorem 22 The components of each eigenvector of the Kronecker

graph $$G_{k}$$ follow a multinomial distribution.

Theorem 23 If atleast one of G and H is a disconnected graph, then

$$G\otimes H$$ is also disconnected.

Theorem 24 If both G and H are connected but bipartite, then

$$G \otimes H$$ is disconnected, and each of the two connected
components is again bipartite.

Theorem 25 Kronecker graphs follow the Densification Power

Law (DPL) with densification exponent
$$a = log(E_{1})/ log(N_{1})$$.

Theorem 26 If G and H each have diameter at most d, and each has

a self-loop on every node, then the Kronecker product
$$G \otimes H$$ also has diameter at most d. Therefore, if
$$G_{1}$$ has diameter d and a self-loop on every node, then for
every k, the graph $$G_{k}$$ also has diameter d.

Theorem 27 If $$G_{1}$$ has diameter d and a self-loop on

every node, then for every q, the q-effective diameter of
$$G_{k}$$ converges to d (from below) as k increases.

12.1 Stochastic Kronecker Graph (SKG) Model

While the Kronecker power construction discussed thus far yields graphs
with a range of desired properties, its discrete nature produces “staircase
effects” in the degrees and spectral quantities, simply because individual
values have large multiplicities. A stochastic version of Kronecker graphs
that eliminates this effect is proposed.
We start with an $$N_{1} \times N_{1}$$ probability matrix
$$\mathcal {P}_{1}$$: the value $$p_{ij}$$ denotes the
probability that edge (i, j) is present. We compute its kth Kronecker power
$$\mathcal {P}_{1}^{[k]} = \mathcal {P}_k$$; and then for each
entry $$p_{uv}$$ of $$P_{k}$$, we include an edge between
nodes u and v with probability $$p_{u,v}$$. The resulting binary
random matrix $$R = R(\mathcal {P}_{k})$$ will be called the
instance matrix (or realization matrix ).
In principle one could try choosing each of the $$N _{1}^{2}$$
parameters for the matrix $$\mathcal {P}_{1}$$ separately. However,
we reduce the number of parameters to just two: $$\alpha $$ and
$$\beta $$. Let $$G_{1}$$ be the initiator matrix (binary,
deterministic); we create the corresponding probability matrix
$$\mathcal {P}_{1}$$ by replacing each “1” and “0” of
$$G_{1}$$ with $$\alpha $$ and $$\beta $$ respectively (
$$\beta \le \alpha $$). The resulting probability matrices maintain,
with some random noise, the self-similar structure of the Kronecker graphs
described earlier (called Deterministic Kronecker graphs for clarity).
The random graphs produced by this model continue to exhibit the
desired properties of real datasets, and without the staircase effect of the
deterministic version.
Formally, a SKG is defined by an integer k and a symmetric
$$2\times 2$$ initiator matrix $$\theta $$:
$$\theta [1,1] = \alpha , \theta [1,0] = \theta [0,1] = \beta , \theta [0,0]
= \gamma $$
, where $$0 \le \gamma \le \beta \le \alpha \le 1$$. The graph has
$$n = 2^{k}$$ vertices, each vertex labelled by a unique bit vector of
length k; given two vertices u with label $$u_{1}u_{2}\dots u_{k}$$
and v with label $$v_{1}v_{2}\dots v_{k}$$, the probability of edge
(u, v) existing, denoted by P[u, v], is
$$\prod _{i}\theta [u_{i}, v_{i}]$$, independent on the presence of
other edges.
 The SKG model is a generalization of the R-MAT model proposed by
[2].
Reference [6] prove the following theorems for SKGs

Theorem 28 The expected degree of a vertex u with weight l is

$$(\alpha +\beta )^{l}(\beta +\gamma )^{k-l}$$.

Theorem 29 The necessary and sufficient condition for Kronecker

graphs to be connected with high probability (for large k) is
$$\beta +\gamma >1$$ or
$$\alpha = \beta = 1, \gamma = 0$$.

Theorem 30 The necessary and sufficient condition for Kronecker

graphs to have a giant component of size $$\Theta (n)$$ with high
probability is $$(\alpha +\beta )(\beta +\gamma )>1$$, or
$$(\alpha +\beta )(\beta +\gamma ) = 1$$ and
$$\alpha +\beta > \beta +\gamma $$.

Theorem 31 If $$\beta +\gamma > 1$$, the diameters of

Kronecker graphs are constant with high probability.

Theorem 32 Kronecker graphs are not

$$n^{(1-\alpha )\log {e}}$$-searchable.

Theorem 33 If $$\beta +max(\alpha ,\gamma )>1$$, then

Kronecker graphs are connected with high probability.
Reference [4] show the results of deterministic and stochastic
Kronecker graphs juxtaposed with real-world networks for the following
datasets:
CIT-HEP-TH: A citation graph for High-Energy Physics Theory research
papers from pre-print archive ArXiv, with a total of 29, 555 papers and
352, 807 citations. One data-point for every month from January 1993 to
April 2003 is present.
AS-ROUTEVIEWS: A static data set consisting of a single snapshot of
connectivity among Internet Autonomous Systems from January 2000
with 6, 474 nodes and 26, 467 edges.
 Figure 12.2 shows the plots for the network properties of CIT-HEP-TH
with that of the deterministic and the stochastic Kronecker graphs.
Figure 12.3 depict the plots of network properties of AS-ROUTEVIEWS
with that of stochastic Kronecker graphs. For reasons of brevity, the plots of
the deterministic Kronecker graphs have been omitted. In both of these
cases, the stochastic Kronecker graphs matches well the properties the real
graphs.

../images/462433_1_En_12_Chapter/462433_1_En_12_Fig2_HTML.gif
Fig. 12.2 CIT-HEP-TH: Patterns from the real graph (top row), the deterministic Kronecker graph
with $$K_{1}$$ being a star graph on 4 nodes (center + 3 satellites) (middle row), and the
Stochastic Kronecker graph ( $$\alpha = 0.41$$ , $$\beta = 0.11$$ - bottom row). Static
patterns: a is the PDF of degrees in the graph (log-log scale), and b the distribution of eigenvalues
(log-log scale). Temporal patterns: c gives the effective diameter over time (linear-linear scale), and d
is the number of edges versus number of nodes over time (log-log scale)

../images/462433_1_En_12_Chapter/462433_1_En_12_Fig3_HTML.gif
Fig. 12.3 AS-ROUTEVIEWS: Real (top) versus Kronecker (bottom). Columns a and b show the
degree distribution and the scree plot. Columns c shows the distribution of network values (principal
eigenvector components, sorted, versus rank) and d shows the hop-plot (the number of reachable
pairs g(h) within h hops or less, as a function of the number of hops h

12.1.1 Fast Generation of SKGs

Generating a SKG on |V| vertices naively takes $$O(|V|^{2})$$ time.
Reference [5] presents a fast heuristic procedure that takes linear time in the
number of edges to generate a graph. To arrive to a particular edge
$$(v_{i}, v_{j})$$ of $$\mathcal {P}_{k}$$ one has to make a
sequence of k decisions among the entries of $$\mathcal {P}_1$$,
multiply the chosen entries of $$\mathcal {P}_1$$, and then placing the
edge $$(v_{i}, v_{j})$$ with the obtained probability.
Thus, instead of flipping $$O(N^{2}) = O(N_{1}^{2k})$$ biased
coins to determine the edges in a graph, we place E edges by directly
simulating the recursion of the Kronecker product. Basically, we recursively
choose sub-regions of matrix K with probability proportional to
$$\theta _{ij}, \theta _{ij} \in \mathcal {P}_{1}$$ until in k steps we
descend to a single cell of the big adjacency matrix K and place an edge.
More generally, the probability of each individual edge of
$$\mathcal {P}_{k}$$ follows a Bernoulli distribution, as the edge
occurrences are independent. By the Central Limit Theorem the number of
edges in $$\mathcal {P}_{k}$$ tends to a normal distribution with
mean
$$(\sum \limits _{i,j=1}^{N_{1}}\theta _{ij})^{k} = E_{1}^{k}$$,
where $$\theta _{ij} \in \mathcal {P}_{1}$$. So, given a stochastic
initiator matrix $$P_{1}$$ we first sample the expected number of
edges E in $$\mathcal {P}_{k}$$. Then we place E edges in a graph
K, by applying the recursive descent for k steps where at each step we
choose entry (i, j) with probability $$\theta _{ij}/E_{1}$$ where
$$E_{1} = \sum _{ij}\theta _{ij}$$. Since we add
$$E = E_{1}^{k}$$ edges, the probability that edge
$$(v_{i}, v_{j})$$ appears in K is exactly
$$\mathcal {P}_{k}[v_{i}, v_{j}]$$. However, in practice it can
happen that more than one edge lands in the same $$(v_{i}, v_{j})$$
entry of big adjacency matrix K. If an edge lands in a already occupied cell
we simply insert it again. Even though values of
$$\mathcal {P}_{1}$$ are usually skewed, adjacency matrices of real
networks are so sparse that collisions are not really a problem in practice as
only around $$1\%$$ of edges collide. It is due to these edge
collisions the above procedure does not obtain exact samples from the
graph distribution defined by the parameter matrix P. However, in practice
graphs generated by this fast linear time (O(E)) procedure are basically
indistinguishable from graphs generated with the exact exponential time
$$(O(N^{2}))$$ procedure.

12.1.2 Noisy Stochastic Kronecker Graph (NSKG) Model

Reference [8] proved that the SKG model cannot generate a power-law
distribution or even a lognormal distribution. However, by using random
noise for smoothing, they proposed an enhanced model, Noisy SKG
(NSKG), that is capable of exhibiting a lognormal distribution.
They found that the degree distributions of the SKG model oscillate
between a lognormal and an exponential tail which is a disappointing
feature. Real degree distributions do not have these large oscillations or the
exponential tail behaviour. By adding small amount of noise, NSKG
straightens out the degree distribution to be lognormal. Figure 12.4 shows
the SKG and NSKG degree distributions.
 ../images/462433_1_En_12_Chapter/462433_1_En_12_Fig4_HTML.gif
Fig. 12.4 Comparison of degree distributions for SKG and two noisy variations

If we consider the SKG model as having to generate a graph

$$G = (V,E)$$ with an arbitrary square generator matrix with |V| as a
power of its size, the $$2 \times 2$$ generating matrix is defined as in
Eq. 12.3.
$$\begin{aligned} T = \begin{bmatrix} t_{1}&t_{2} \\
t_{3}&t_{4} \\ \end{bmatrix} \ with\ t_{1} + t_{2} + t_{3} + (12.3)
t_{4} = 1. \end{aligned}$$
The NSKG model adds some noise to this matrix given as follows. Let b be
noise parameter $$b \le min((t_{1}+t_{4})/2,t_{2})$$. For each level
$$i \le l$$, define a new matrix $$T_{i}$$ in such a way that
the expectation of $$T_{i}$$ is just T, i.e, for level i, choose
$$\mu _{i}$$ to be a uniform random number in the range
$$[-b,+b]$$. Set $$T_{i}$$ to be
$$\begin{aligned} T = \begin{bmatrix} t_{1}-\frac{2\mu
_{i}t_{1}}{t_{1}+t_{4}}&t_{2}+\mu _{i} \\ t_{3}+\mu (12.4)
_{i}&t_{4}-\frac{2\mu _{i}t_{4}}{t_{1}+t_{4}} \\
\end{bmatrix} \end{aligned}$$
$$T_{i}$$ is symmetric with all its entries positive and summing to
1.

12.2 Distance-Dependent Kronecker Graph

Theorem 32 shows that Kronecker graphs are not searchable by a
distributed greedy algorithm. Reference [1] propose an extension to the
SKGs that is capable of generating searchable networks. By using a new
“Kronecker-like” operation and a family of generator matrices,
$$\mathcal {H}$$, both dependent upon the distance between two nodes,
this generation method yields networks that have both a local (lattice-based)
and global (distance-dependent) structure. This dual structure allows a
greedy algorithm to search the network using only local information.
Kronecker graphs are generated by iteratively Kronecker-multiplying
one initiator matrix with itself to produce a new adjacency or probability
matrix. Here, a distance-dependent Kronecker operator is defined.
Depending on the distance between two nodes u and v,
$$d(u, v) \in \mathbb {Z}$$, a different matrix from a defined family
will be selected to be multiplied by that entry.
$$\begin{aligned} C = A \otimes _{d} \mathcal {H} = \left(
\begin{matrix} a_{11}H_{d(1,1)} &{} a_{12}H_{d(1,2)}
&{} \dots &{} a_{1n}H_{d(1,n)} \\ a_{21}H_{d(2,1)}
&{} a_{22}H_{d(2,2)} &{} \dots &{} (12.5)
a_{2n}H_{d(2,n)} \\ \dots &{} \dots &{} \ddots &{}
\dots \\ a_{n1}H_{d(n,1)} &{} a_{n2}H_{d(n,2)} &{}
\dots &{} a_{nn}H_{d(n,n)} \\ \end{matrix} \right) \ where\
\mathcal {H} = \{H_{i}\}_{i \in \mathbb {Z}} \end{aligned}$$
This makes the kth Kronecker power as in Eq. 12.6
$$\begin{aligned} G_{k} = \underbrace{G_{1} \otimes _{d}
\mathcal {H} \dots \otimes _{d} \mathcal {H}}_{k\ times} (12.6)
\end{aligned}$$
In this Kronecker-like multiplication, the choice of $$H_{i}$$ from
the family $$\mathcal {H}$$, multiplying entry (u, v), is dependent
upon the distance d(u, v). $$d(u,v) = -d(v,u)$$ and
$$H_{d(u,v)} = H'_{d(v,u)}$$. This change to the Kronecker
operation makes the model more complicated at the cost of some of the
beneficial properties of Kronecker multiplication. Instead, we gain
generality and the ability to create many different lattices and probability of
long-range contacts.
Reference [1] explains how the conventional Kronecker graphs can be
generated from these distance-dependent ones. Additionally, it is also
mathematically proved that the Watts-Strogatz model cannot be generated
from the original Kronecker graphs.

12.3 KRONFIT
Reference [5] presented KRONFIT, a fast and scalable algorithm for fitting
Kronecker graphs by using the maximum likelihood principle. A
Metropolis sampling algorithm was developed for sampling node
correspondences, and approximating the likelihood of obtaining a linear
time algorithm for Kronecker graph model parameter estimation that scales
to large networks with millions of nodes and edges.
 ../images/462433_1_En_12_Chapter/462433_1_En_12_Fig5_HTML.gif
Fig. 12.5 Schematic illustration of the multifractal graph generator. a The construction of the link
probability measure. Start from a symmetric generating measure on the unit square defined by a set
of probabilities $$p_{ij} = p_{ji}$$ associated to $$m \times m$$ rectangles (shown on the
left). Here $$m = 2$$ , the length of the intervals defining the rectangles is given by $$l_{1}$$
and $$l_{2}$$ respectively, and the magnitude of the probabilities is indicated by both the height
and the colour of the corresponding boxes. The generating measure is iterated by recursively
multiplying each box with the generating measure itself as shown in the middle and on the right,
yielding $$m^{k} \times m^{k}$$ boxes at iteration k. The variance of the height of the boxes
(corresponding to the probabilities associated to the rectangles) becomes larger at each step,
producing a surface which is getting rougher and rougher, meanwhile the symmetry and the self
similar nature of the multifractal is preserved. b Drawing linking probabilities from the obtained
measure. Assign random coordinates in the unit interval to the nodes in the graph, and link each node
pair I, J with a probability given by the probability measure at the corresponding coordinates

../images/462433_1_En_12_Chapter/462433_1_En_12_Fig6_HTML.gif
Fig. 12.6 A small network generated with the multifractal network generator. a The generating
measure (on the left) and the link probability measure (on the right). The generating measure consists
of $$3\times 3$$ rectangles for which the magnitude of the associated probabilities is indicated by
the colour. The number of iterations, k, is set to $$k = 3$$ , thus the final link probability measure
consists of $$27\times 27$$ boxes, as shown in the right panel. b A network with 500 nodes
generated from the link probability measure. The colours of the nodes were chosen as follows. Each
row in the final linking probability measure was assigned a different colour, and the nodes were
coloured according to their position in the link probability measure. (Thus, nodes falling into the
same row have the same colour)

12.4 KRONEM
Reference [3] addressed the network completion problem by using the
observed part of the network to fit a model of network structure, and then
estimating the missing part of the network using the model, re-estimating
the parameters and so on. This is combined with the Kronecker graphs
model to design a scalable Metropolized Gibbs sampling approach that
allows for the estimation of the model parameters as well as the inference
about missing nodes and edges of the network.
The problem of network completion is cast into the Expectation
Maximisation (EM) framework and the KRONEM algorithm is developed
that alternates between the following two stages. First, the observed part of
the network is used to estimate the parameters of the network model. This
estimated model then gives us a way to infer the missing part of the
network. Now, we act as if the complete network is visible and we re-
estimate the model. This in turn gives us a better way to infer the missing
part of the network. We iterate between the model estimation step (the M-
step) and the inference of the hidden part of the network (the E-step) until
the model parameters converge.
The advantages of KronEM are the following: It requires a small
number of parameters and thus does not overfit the network. It infers not
only the model parameters but also the mapping between the nodes of the
true and the estimated networks. The approach can be directly applied to
cases when collected network data is incomplete. It provides an accurate
probabilistic prior over the missing network structure and easily scales to
large networks.

12.5 Multifractal Network Generator

Reference [7] proposed the following network generator. This generator has
three stages: First, a generating measure is defined on the unit square. Next,
the generating measure is transformed into a link probability measure
through a couple of iterations. Finally, links are drawn between the vertices
using the link probability measure.
The generating measure is defined as follows: Both the x and y axis of
the unit square are identically divided into m (not necessarily equal)
intervals, splitting it into $$m^{2}$$ rectangles. Each rectangle is
assigned a probability $$p_{ij}$$. These probabilities must be
normalized, $$\sum p_{ij} = 1$$ and symmetric
$$p_{ij} = p_{ji}$$.
The link probability measure is obtained by recursively multiplying
each rectangle with the generating measure k times. This results in
$$m^{2k}$$ rectangles, each associated with a linking probability
$$p_{ij}(k)$$ equivalent to product of k factors from the original
generating $$p_{ij}$$.
N points are distributed independently, uniformly at random on the
[0, 1] interval, and each pair is linked with probability $$p_{ij}(k)$$
at the given coordinates.
Figure 12.5 illustrates the working of a multifactor generator.
Figure 12.6 depicts the generation of a network using this generator.
References
1. Bodine-Baron, Elizabeth, Babak Hassibi, and Adam Wierman. 2010. Distance-dependent
kronecker graphs for modeling social networks. IEEE Journal of Selected Topics in Signal
Processing 4 (4): 718–731.
[Crossref]

2. Chakrabarti, Deepayan, Yiping Zhan, and Christos Faloutsos. 2004. R-mat: A recursive model for
graph mining. In Proceedings of the 2004 SIAM international conference on data mining, 442–
446. SIAM.

3. Kim, Myunghwan, and Jure Leskovec. 2011. The network completion problem: Inferring missing
nodes and edges in networks. In Proceedings of the 2011 SIAM International Conference on Data
Mining, 47–58. SIAM.

4. Leskovec, Jurij, Deepayan Chakrabarti, Jon Kleinberg, and Christos Faloutsos. 2005. Realistic,
mathematically tractable graph generation and evolution, using Kronecker multiplication. In
European conference on principles of data mining and knowledge discovery, 133–145. Berlin:
Springer.

5. Leskovec, Jure, Deepayan Chakrabarti, Jon Kleinberg, Christos Faloutsos, and Zoubin
Ghahramani. 2010. Kronecker graphs: An approach to modeling networks. Journal of Machine
Learning Research 11 (Feb): 985–1042.

6. Mahdian Mohammad, and Ying Xu. 2007. Stochastic Kronecker graphs. In International
workshop on algorithms and models for the web-graph, 179–186. Berlin: Springer.

7. Palla, Gergely, László Lovász, and Tamás Vicsek. 2010. Multifractal network generator.
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 107 (17): 7640–7645.
[Crossref]

8. Seshadhri, Comandur, Ali Pinar, and Tamara G. Kolda. 2013. An in-depth analysis of stochastic
Kronecker graphs. Journal of the ACM (JACM) 60 (2): 13.
© Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2018
Krishna Raj P.M., Ankith Mohan and K.G. Srinivasa, Practical Social Network Analysis with Python,
Computer Communications and Networks
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-96746-2_13

13. Link Analysis

Krishna Raj P. M.1 , Ankith Mohan1 and K. G. Srinivasa2

(1) Department of ISE, Ramaiah Institute of Technology, Bangalore,

Karnataka, India
(2) Department of Information Technology, C.B.P. Government
Engineering College, Jaffarpur, Delhi, India

Krishna Raj P. M.
Email: krishnarajpm@gmail.com

13.1 Search Engine

A search engine is an application which takes as input a search query and
returns a list of relevant Webpages. Reference [3] explains in detail the
general architecture of a typical search engine as shown in Fig. 13.1.
Every engine requires a crawler module. A crawler is a small program
that browses the Web by following links. The crawlers are given a starting
set of pages. They then retrieve the URLs appearing in these pages and give
it to the crawl control module. The crawl control module determines what
links to visit next, and feeds the links to visit back to the crawler. The
crawler also stores the retrieved pages in the page repository.
The indexer module extracts all the words from each page, and records
the URL where each word occurred. The result is a very large “lookup
table” that has URLs mapped to the pages where a given word occurs. This
index is the text index. The indexer module could also generate a structure
index, which reflects the links between pages. The collection analysis
module is responsible for creating other kinds of indexes, such as the utility
index. Utility indexes may provide access to pages of a given length, pages
of a certain “importance”, or pages with some number of images in them.
The text and structure indexes may be used when creating utility indexes.
The crawl controller can change the crawling operation based on these
indexes.
The query engine module receives and files search requests from users.
For the queries received by the query engine, the results may be too large to
be directly displayed to the user. The ranking module is therefore tasked
with the responsibility to sort the results.

../images/462433_1_En_13_Chapter/462433_1_En_13_Fig1_HTML.gif
Fig. 13.1 Typical search engine architecture

13.1.1 Crawling
The crawler module starts with an initial set of URLs $$S_{0}$$ which
are initially kept in a priority queue. From the queue, the crawler gets a
URL, downloads the page, extracts any URLs in the downloaded page, and
puts the new URLs in the queue. This process repeats until the crawl
control module asks the crawler to stop.

13.1.1.1 Page Selection

Due to the sheer quantity of pages in the Web and limit in the available
resources, the crawl control program has to decide which pages to crawl,
and which not to. The “importance” of a page can be defined in one of the
following ways:
1.
Interest Driven: The important pages can be defined as those of
“interest to” the users. This could be defined in the following manner:
given a query Q, the importance of the page P is defined as the textual
similarity between P and Q [1]. This metric is referred to as
$$IS(\cdot )$$.
2.
Popularity Driven: Page importance depends on how “popular” a page
is. Popularity can be defined in terms of a page’s in-degree. However, a
page’s popularity is the in-degree with respect to the entire Web. This
can be denoted as $$IB(\cdot )$$. The crawler may have to instead
provide an estimate $$IB'(\cdot )$$ with the in-degree from the pages
seen so far.
Location Driven: This importance measure is computed as a function
 Location Driven: This importance measure is computed as a function
3.
of a page’s location instead of its contents. Denoted as $$IL(\cdot )$$
, if URL u leads to a page P, then IL(P) is a function of u.
Therefore, the importance of a page P can be defined as
$$IC(P) = k_{1}IS(P) + k_{2}IB(P) + k_{3}IL(P)$$, for constants
$$k_{1}$$, $$k_{2}$$, $$k_{3}$$ and query Q.
Next, we will look at the performance of a crawler. The following ways
may be used to compute the performance:
1.
Crawl and stop: Under this method, a crawler C starts at a page
$$P_{0}$$ and stops after visiting K pages. Here, K denotes the
number of pages that the crawler can download in one crawl. At this
point a perfect crawler would have visited $$R_{1},\dots ,R_{K}$$,
where $$R_{1}$$ is the page with the highest importance value,
$$R_{2}$$ is the next highest, and so on. These pages $$R_{1}$$
through $$R_{K}$$ are called the hot pages. The K pages visited by
our real crawler will contain only $$M (\le K)$$ pages with rank
higher than or equal to that of $$R_{K}$$. We need to know the
exact rank of all pages in order to obtain the value M. The performance
of the crawler C is computed as $$P_{CS}(C) = (M\cdot 100)/K$$.
Although the performance of the perfect crawler is $$100\%$$, a
crawler that manages to visit pages at random would have a
performance of $$(K \cdot 100)/T$$, where T is the total number of
pages in the Web.
2.
Crawl and stop with threshold: Assume that a crawler visits K pages. If
we are given an importance target G, then any page with importance
target greater than G is considered hot. If we take the total number of
hot pages to be H, then the performance of the crawler,
$$P_{ST}(C)$$, is the percentage of the H hot pages that have been
visited when the crawler stops. If $$K < H$$, then an ideal crawler
will have performance $$(K \cdot 100)/H$$. If $$K \ge H$$, then
the ideal crawler has $$100\%$$ performance. A purely random
crawler that revisits pages is expected to visit (H / T)K hot pages when
it stops. Thus, its performance is $$(k \cdot 100)/T$$. Only if the
random crawler visits all T pages, is its performance expected to be
$$100\%$$.
13.1.1.2 Page Refresh
Once the crawler has downloaded the “important” pages, these pages must
be periodically refreshed to remain up-to-date. The following strategies can
be used to refresh the pages:
1.
Uniform refresh policy: All pages are revisited at the same frequency f,
regardless of how often they change.
2.
Proportional refresh policy: The crawler visits a page proportional to
its change. If $$\lambda _{i}$$ is the change frequency of a page
$$e_{i}$$, and $$f_{i}$$ is the crawler’s revisit frequency for
$$e_{i}$$, then the frequency ratio $$\lambda _{i}/f_{i}$$ is the
same for any i. Keep in mind that the crawler needs to estimate
$$\lambda _{i}$$’s for each page, in order to implement this policy.
This estimation can be based on the change history of a page that the
crawler can collect [9].
Reference [3] defines the “freshness” and “age” of a Webpage as
follows:
1. Freshness: Let $$S = \{e_{1},\dots ,e_{N}\}$$ be the collection of N
pages. The freshness of a local page $$e_{i}$$ at time t is as given in
Eq. 13.1
$$\begin{aligned} F(e_{i};t) = {\left\{ \begin{array}{ll} 1\ if\
e_{i}\ is\ up-to-date\ at\ time\ t \\ 0\ otherwise \end{array}\right. (13.1)
} \end{aligned}$$
Then the freshness of the local collection S at time t is as given in
Eq. 13.2.
$$\begin{aligned} F(S;t) = \frac{1}{N}\sum \limits (13.2)
_{i=1}^{N}F(e_{i};t) \end{aligned}$$
Since the pages get refreshed over time, the time average of the
freshness of page $$e_{i}$$, $$\overline{F}(e_{i})$$, and the
time average of the freshness of collection S, $$\overline{F}(S)$$,
are defined as in Eqs. 13.3 and 13.4.
$$\begin{aligned} \overline{F}(e_{i}) = \lim _{t\rightarrow (13.3)
\infty }\frac{1}{t}\int _{0}^{t}F(e_{i};t)dt \end{aligned}$$
 $$\begin{aligned} \overline{F}(S) = \lim _{t\rightarrow \infty (13.4)
}\frac{1}{t}\int _{0}^{t}F(S;t)dt \end{aligned}$$
2.
Age: The age of the local page $$e_{i}$$ at time t is as given in
Eq. 13.5.
$$\begin{aligned} A(e_{i};t) = {\left\{ \begin{array}{ll} 0\ if\
e_{i}\ is\ up-to-date\ at\ time\ t \\ t-modification\ time\ of\ e_{i}\ (13.5)
otherwise \end{array}\right. } \end{aligned}$$
Then the age of the local collection S at time t is as given in Eq. 13.6.
$$\begin{aligned} A(S;t) = \frac{1}{N}\sum \limits (13.6)
_{i=1}^{N}A(e_{i};t) \end{aligned}$$

13.1.2 Storage
The storage repository of a search engine must perform two basic functions.
First, it must provide an interface for the crawler to store pages. Second, it
must provide an efficient access API that the indexer module and the
collection analysis module can use to retrieve pages.
The issues a repository must deal with are as follows: First, it must be
scalable, i.e, it must be capable of being distributed across a cluster of
systems. Second, it must be capable of supporting both random access and
streaming access equally efficiently. Random access for quickly retrieving a
specific Webpage, given the page’s unique identifier to serve out cached
copies to the end-user. Streaming access to receive the entire collection as a
stream of pages to provide pages in bulk for the indexer and analysis
module to process and analyse. Third, since the Web changes rapidly, the
repository needs to handle a high rate of modifications since pages have to
be refreshed periodically. Lastly, the repository must have a mechanism of
detecting and removing obsolete pages that have been removed from the
Web.
A distributed Web repository that is designed to function over a cluster
of interconnected storage nodes must deal with the following issues that
affect the characteristics and performance of the repository. A detailed
explanation of these issues are found in [15].

13.1.2.1 Page Distribution Policies

Pages can be assigned to nodes using a number of different policies. In a
uniform distribution policy, all nodes are treated identically, and a page can
be assigned to any of these nodes, independent of its identifier. Thus each
node will store portions of the collection proportionate to its storage
capacity. On the other hand, a hash distribution policy allocates pages to
nodes depending on the page identifiers. A page identifier would be hashed
to yield a node identifier and the page would be allocated to the
corresponding node.

13.1.2.2 Physical Page Organization Methods

In essence, physical page organization at each node determines how well
each node supports page addition/insertion, high-speed streaming and
random page access .
A hash-based organization treats a disk as a set of hash-buckets, each of
which is small enough to fit in memory. Pages are assigned to hash buckets
depending on their page identifier. For page additions, a log-structured
organization may be used in which the entire disk is treated as a large
contiguous log to which incoming pages are appended. Random access is
supported using a separate B-tree index that maps page identifiers to
physical locations on disk. One can also devise a hybrid hashed-log
organization, where storage is divided into large sequential “extents”, as
opposed to buckets that fit in memory. Pages are hashed into extents, and
each extent is organized like a log-structured file.

13.1.2.3 Update Strategies

The updates of the crawler can be structured in two ways:
1.
Batch-mode or steady crawler: A batch-mode crawler is periodically
executed and allowed to crawl for a certain amount of time or until a
targeted set of pages have been crawled, and then stopped. In contrast,
a steady crawler runs continuously, without pause, supplying updates
and new pages to the repository.
2.
Partial or complete crawls: A partial crawl recrawls only a specific set
of pages, while a complete crawl performs a total crawl of all the
pages. This makes sense only for a batch- mode crawler while a steady
crawler cannot make such a distinction.
In-place update or shadowing: With in-place updates, pages received
 p ace update o s adow g: W t p ace updates, pages ece ved
3. from the crawl are directly integrated into the repository’s existing
collection, probably replacing the older version. With shadowing,
pages from a crawl are stored separate from the existing collection and
updates are applied in a separate step.
The advantage of shadowing is that the reading and updating tasks
can be delegated to two separate nodes thereby ensuring that a node
does not have to concurrently handle both page addition and retrieval.
However, this is a two-edged sword. While avoiding conflict by
simplifying implementation and improving performance, there is a
delay between the time a page is retrieved by the crawler and the time
it is available for access.

13.1.3 Indexing
The indexer and the collection analysis modules are responsible for
generating the text, structure and the utility indexes. Here, we describe the
indexes.

13.1.3.1 Structure Index

To build this index, the crawled content is modelled as a graph with nodes
and edges. This index helps search algorithms by providing neighbourhood
information: For a page P, retrieve the set of pages pointed to by P or the
set of pages pointing to P, and sibling pages: Pages related to a given page
P.
An inverted index over a collection of Webpages consists of a set of
inverted lists, one for each word. The inverted list for a term is a sorted
collection of locations (page identifier and the position of the term in the
page) where the term appears in the collection.
To make the inverted index scalable, there are two basic strategies for
partitioning the inverted index across a collection of nodes.
In the local inverted file ( $$IF_{L}$$) organization [21], each
node is responsible for a disjoint subset of pages in the collection. A search
query would be broadcast to all nodes, each of which would return disjoint
lists of page identifiers containing the search terms.
Global inverted file ( $$IF_{G}$$) organization [21] partitions on
index terms so that each query server stores inverted lists only for a subset
of the terms in the collection.
 Reference [19] describes important characteristics of the
$$IF_{L}$$ strategy that make this organization ideal for the Web
search environment. Performance studies in [22] indicate that
$$IF_{L}$$ organization uses system resources effectively and
provides good query throughput in most cases.

13.1.3.2 Text Index

Traditional information retrieval methods using suffix arrays, inverted
indices and signature files, can be be used to generate these text index.

13.1.3.3 Utility Index

The number and type of utility indexes built by the collection analysis
module depends on the features of the query engine and the type of
information used by the ranking module.

13.1.4 Ranking
The query engine collects search terms from the user and retrieves pages
that are likely to be relevant. These pages cannot be returned to the user in
this format and must be ranked.
However, the problem of ranking is faced with the following issues.
First, before the task of ranking pages, one must first retrieve the pages that
are relevant to a search. This information retrieval suffers from problems of
synonymy (multiple terms that more or less mean the same thing) and
polysemy (multiple meanings of the same term, so by the term “jaguar”, do
you mean the animal, the automobile company, the American football team,
or the operating system).
Second, the time of retrieval plays a pivotal role. For instance, in the
case of an event such as a calamity, government and news sites will update
their pages as and when they receive information. The search engine not
only has to retrieve the pages repeatedly, but will have to re-rank the pages
depending on which page currently has the latest report.
Third, with every one capable of writing a Web page, the Web has an
abundance of information for any topic. For example, the term “social
network analysis” returns a search of around 56 million results. Now, the
task is to rank these results in a manner such that the most important ones
appear first.
13.1.4.1 HITS Algorithm
When you search for the term “msrit”, what makes www.msrit.edu a good
answer? The idea is that the page www.msrit.edu is not going to use the
term “msrit” more frequently or prominently than other pages. Therefore,
there is nothing in the page that makes it stand out in particular. Rather, it
stands out because of features on other Web pages: when a page is relevant
to “msrit”, very often www.msrit.edu is among the pages it links to.
One approach is to first retrieve a large collection of Web pages that are
relevant to the query “msrit” using traditional information retrieval. Then,
these pages are voted based on which page on the Web receives the greatest
number of in-links from pages that are relevant to msrit. In this manner,
there will ultimately be a page that will be ranked first.
Consider the search for the term “newspapers”. Unlike the case of
“msrit”, the position for a good answer for the term “newspapers” is not
necessarily a single answer. If we try the traditional information retrieval
approach, then we will get a set of pages variably pointing to several of the
news sites.
Now we attempt to tackle the problem from another direction. Since
finding the best answer for a query is incumbent upon the retrieved pages,
finding good retrieved pages will automatically result in finding good
answers. Figure 13.2 shows a set of retrieved pages pointing to newspapers.

../images/462433_1_En_13_Chapter/462433_1_En_13_Fig2_HTML.gif
Fig. 13.2 Counting in-links to pages for the query “newspapers”

We observe from Fig. 13.2 that among the sites casting votes, a few of
them voted for many of the pages that received a lot of votes. Therefore, we
could say that these pages have a sense where the good answers are, and to
score them highly as lists. Thus, a page’s value as a list is equal to the sum
of the votes received by all pages that it voted for. Figure 13.3 depicts the
result of applying this rule to the pages casting votes.

../images/462433_1_En_13_Chapter/462433_1_En_13_Fig3_HTML.gif
Fig. 13.3 Finding good lists for the query “newspapers”: each page’s value as a list is written as a
number inside it
 If pages scoring well as lists are believed to actually have a better sense
for where the good results are, then we should weigh their votes more
heavily. So, in particular, we could tabulate the votes again, but this time
giving each page’s vote a weight equal to its value as a list. Figure 13.4
illustrates what happens when weights are accounted for in the newspaper
case.

../images/462433_1_En_13_Chapter/462433_1_En_13_Fig4_HTML.gif
Fig. 13.4 Re-weighting votes for the query “newspapers”: each of the labelled page’s new score is
equal to the sum of the values of all lists that point to it

This re-weighting can be done repeatedly.

The “good” answers that we were originally seeking for a query are
called the authorities for the query and the high-value lists are called the
hubs for the query. The goal here is to estimate a page p’s value as a
potential authority and as a potential hub. Therefore, each page p is
assigned two numerical scores: auth(p) and hub(p). Each of these initially
starts out at 1.
Now, auth(p) and hub(p) are updated according to the Authority Update
rule and Hub Update rule respectively. The authority update rule states that
for each page p, auth(p) is computed as the sum of the hub scores of all
pages that point to it. The hub update rule says that for each page p, hub(p)
is the sum of the authority scores of all pages that it points to.
By the principle of repeated improvement, we do the following:
1.
Start with all hub and authority scores equal to 1.
2.
Choose a number of steps k.
3.
Perform a sequence of k hub-authority updates. Each update works as
follows:
Apply the Authority Update rule to the current set of scores.
Apply the Hub Update rule to the resulting set of scores.
4. The resultant hub and authority scores may involve numbers that are
very large (as can be seen in Fig. 13.4). But we are concerned only with
their relative size and therefore they can be normalized: we divide
down each authority score by the sum of all authority scores and
 down each authority score by the sum of all authority scores, and
divide down each hub score by the sum of all hub scores. Figure 13.5
shows the normalized scores of Fig. 13.4.
This algorithm is commonly known as the HITS algorithm [16].

../images/462433_1_En_13_Chapter/462433_1_En_13_Fig5_HTML.gif
Fig. 13.5 Re-weighting votes after normalizing for the query “newspapers”

However, as k goes to infinity, the normalized values converge to a

limit. Figure 13.6 depicts the limiting values for the “newspaper” query.

../images/462433_1_En_13_Chapter/462433_1_En_13_Fig6_HTML.gif
Fig. 13.6 Limiting hub and authority values for the query “newspapers”

These limiting values correspond to a state of equilibrium where a page

p’s authority score is proportional to the hub scores of the pages that point
to p, and p’s hub score is proportional to the authority scores of the pages p
points to.
When we intend to perform the spectral analysis of HITS algorithm, we
will first represent the network of n nodes as an adjacency matrix M.
Although, it is not a very efficient way to represent a large network (as
studied in Chap. 1), it is conceptually useful for analysis.
The hub and authority scores are represented as vectors in n dimensions.
The vector of hub scores is denoted as h where the ith element represents
the hub score of node i. On similar lines, we denote the vector of authority
scores as a. Thus, the Hub Update rule can be represented by Eq. 13.7 and
therefore the Authority Update rule can be represented by Eq. 13.8.
$$\begin{aligned} h \leftarrow M \cdot a \end{aligned}$$ (13.7)

$$\begin{aligned} a \leftarrow M^{T} \cdot h \end{aligned}$$ (13.8)

The k-step hub-authority computations for large values of k is be described
below:
The initial authority and hub vectors are denoted as $$a^{[0]}$$
and $$h^{[0]}$$ each of which are equal to unit vectors. Let
$$a^{[k]}$$ and $$h^{[k]}$$ represent the vectors of authority
and hub scores after k applications of the Authority and Hub Update Rules
in order. This gives us Eqs. 13.9 and 13.10.
$$\begin{aligned} a^{[1]} = M^{T}h^{[0]} \end{aligned}$$ (13.9)
and
$$\begin{aligned} h^{[1]} = Ma^{[1]} = MM^{T}h^{[0]} (13.10)
\end{aligned}$$
In the next step, we get
$$\begin{aligned} a^{[2]} = M^{T}h^{[1]} = (13.11)
M^{T}MM^{T}h^{[0]} \end{aligned}$$
and
$$\begin{aligned} h^{[2]} = Ma^{[2]} =
MM^{T}MM^{T}h^{[0]} = (MM^{T})^{2}h^{[0]} (13.12)
\end{aligned}$$
For larger values of k, we have
$$\begin{aligned} a^{[k]} = (M^{T}M)^{k-1}M^{T}h^{[0]} (13.13)
\end{aligned}$$
and
$$\begin{aligned} h^{[k]} = (MM^{T})^{k}h^{[0]} (13.14)
\end{aligned}$$
Now we will look at the convergence of this process.
Consider the constants c and d. If
$$\begin{aligned} \frac{h^{[k]}}{c^{k}} = (13.15)
\frac{(MM^{T})^{k}h^{[0]}}{c^{k}} \end{aligned}$$
is going to converge to a limit $$h^{[*]}$$, we expect that at the
limit, the direction of $$h^{[*]}$$ shouldn’t change when it is
multiplied by $$(MM^{T})$$, although its length might grow by a
factor of c, i.e, we expect that $$h^{*}$$ will satisfy the equation
$$\begin{aligned} (MM^{T})h^{[*]} = ch^{[*]} \end{aligned}$$ (13.16)
This means that $$h^{[*]}$$ is the eigenvector of the matrix
$$MM^{T}$$, with c a corresponding eigenvalue.
Any symmetric matrix with n rows and n columns has a set of n
eigenvectors that are all unit vectors and all mutually orthogonal, i.e, they
form a basis for the space $$\mathbb {R}^{n}$$.
 Since $$MM^{T}$$ is symmetric, we get the n mutually
orthogonal eigenvectors as $$z_{1}, \dots , z_{n}$$, with
corresponding eigenvalues $$c_{1}, \dots , c_{n}$$. Let
$$|c_{1}| \ge |c_{2}| \ge \dots \ge |c_{n}|$$. Suppose that
$$|c_{1}| > |c_{2}|$$, if we have to compute the matrix-vector
product $$(MM^{T})x$$ for any vector x, we could first write x as a
linear combination of the vectors $$z_{1},\dots ,z_{n}$$, i.e,
$$x = p_{1}z_{1}+p_{2}z_{2}+\dots +p_{n}z_{n}$$ for
coefficients $$p_{1},\dots ,p_{n}$$. Thus
$$\begin{aligned} \begin{aligned} (MM^{T})x&=
(MM^{T})(p_{1}z_{1}+p_{2}z_{2}+\dots +p_{n}z_{n})
\\&= p_{1}MM^{T}z_{1}+p_{2}MM^{T}z_{2}+\dots (13.17)
+p_{n}MM^{T}z_{n} \\&=
p_{1}c_{1}z_{1}+p_{2}c_{2}z_{2}+\dots +p_{n}c_{n}z_{n} \\
\end{aligned} \end{aligned}$$
k multiplications of $$MM^{T}$$ of the matrix-vector product will
therefore give us
$$\begin{aligned} (MM^{T})^{k}x =
c_{1}^{k}p_{1}z_{1}+c_{2}^{k}p_{2}z_{2}+\dots (13.18)
+c_{n}^{k}p_{n}z_{n} \end{aligned}$$
Applying Eq. 13.18 to the vector of hub scores, we get
$$h^{[k]} = (MM^{T})h^{[0]}$$. Since $$h^{[0]}$$ is just a
starting unit vector, it can be represented in terms of the basis vectors
$$z_{1},\dots ,z_{n}$$ as some linear combination
$$h^{[0]} = q_{1}z_{1}+q_{2}z_{2}+\dots +q_{n}z_{n}$$. So,
$$\begin{aligned} h^{[k]} = (MM^{T})^{k}h^{[0]} =
c_{1}^{k}q_{1}z_{1}+c_{2}^{k}q_{2}z_{2}+\dots (13.19)
+c_{n}^{k}q_{n}z_{n} \end{aligned}$$
Dividing both sides by $$c_{1}^{k}$$, we get
$$\begin{aligned} \frac{h^{[k]}}{c_{1}^{k}} = q_{1}z_{1} +
\left( \frac{c_{2}}{c_{1}}\right) ^{k}q_{2}z_{2} + \dots + \left( (13.20)
\frac{c_{n}}{c_{1}}\right) ^{k}q_{n}z_{n} \end{aligned}$$
Since $$|c_{1}| > |c_{2}|$$, as k goes to infinity, every term on the
right-hand side except the first is going to 0. This means that the sequence
of vectors $$\frac{h^{[k]}}{c_{1}^{k}}$$ converges to the limit
$$q_{1}z_{1}$$ as k goes to infinity.
What would happen if we began the computation from some starting
vector x, instead of the unit vector $$h^{[0]}$$? If x is a positive
vector expressed as $$x = p_{1}z_{1}+\dots +p_{n}z_{n}$$ for
some coefficients $$p_{1},\dots ,p_{n}$$, and so
$$(MM^{T})^{k}x = c_{1}^{k}p_{1}z_{1}+\dots
+c_{n}^{k}p_{n}z_{n}$$
. Then, $$\frac{h^{[k]}}{c_{1}^{k}}$$ converges to
$$p_{1}z_{1}$$. Thus, we converge to a vector in the direction of
$$z_{1}$$ even with this new starting vector.
Now we consider the case when the assumption
$$|c_{1}|>|c_{2}|$$ is relaxed. Let’s say that there are
$$l > 1$$ eigenvalues that are tied for the largest absolute value,
i.e, $$|c_{1}|=\dots =|c_{l}|$$, and then
$$c_{l+1},\dots ,c_{n}$$, are all smaller in absolute value. With all
the eigenvalues in $$MM^{T}$$ being non-negative, we have
$$c_{1}=\dots =c_{l}>c_{l+1}\ge \dots \ge c_{n}\ge 0$$. This
gives us
$$\begin{aligned} \frac{h^{[k]}}{c_{1}^{k}} =
\frac{c_{1}^{k}q_{1}z_{1}+\dots +c_{n}^{k}q_{n}z_{n}}
{c_{1}^{k}} = q_{1}z_{1}+\dots +\,q_{l}z_{l}+\left( (13.21)
\frac{c_{l+1}}{c_{l}}\right) ^{k}q_{l+1}z_{l+1}+\dots +\left(
\frac{c_{n}}{c_{1}}\right) ^{k}q_{n}z_{n} \end{aligned}$$
Terms $$l+1$$ through n of this sum go to zero, and so the sequence
converges to $$q_{1}z_{1}+\dots +q_{l}z_{l}$$. Thus, when
$$c_{1} = c_{2}$$, we still have convergence, but the limit to which
the sequence converges might now depend on the choice of the initial
vector $$h^{[0]}$$ (and particularly its inner product with each of
$$z_{1},\dots ,z_{l}$$). In practice, with real and sufficiently large
hyperlink structures, one essentially always gets a matrix M with the
property that $$MM^{T}$$ has $$|c_{1}| > |c_{2}|$$.
This can be adapted directly to analyse the sequence of authority
vectors. For the authority vectors, we are looking at powers of
$$(M^{T}M)$$, and so the basic result is that the vector of authority
scores will converge to an eigenvector of the matrix $$M^{T}M$$
associated with its largest eigenvalue.
13.1.4.2 PageRank
PageRank [7] also works on the same principle as HITS algorithm. It starts
with simple voting based on in-links, and refines it using the Principle of
Repeated Improvement.
PageRank can be thought of as a “fluid” that circulates through the
network, passing from node to node across edges, and pooling at the nodes
that are most important. It is computed as follows:
1.
In a network with n nodes, all nodes are assigned the same initial
PageRank, set to be 1 / n.
2.
Choose a number of steps k.
3.
Perform a sequence of k updates to the PageRank values, using the
following Basic PageRank Update rule for each update: Each page
divides its current PageRank equally across its out-going links, and
passes these equal shares to the pages it points to. If a page has no out-
going links, it passes all its current PageRank to itself. Each page
updates its new PageRank to be the sum of the shares it receives.
This algorithm requires no normalization because the PageRank values
are just moved around with no chance of increase.
Figure 13.7 is an instance of a network with eight Webpages. All of
these pages start out with a PageRank of 1 / 8. Their PageRanks after the
first two updates are as tabulated in Table 13.1.

../images/462433_1_En_13_Chapter/462433_1_En_13_Fig7_HTML.gif
Fig. 13.7 A collection of eight web pages

Similar to the HITS algorithm, the PageRank values converge to a limit

as k goes to infinity. Figure 13.8 depicts the equilibrium PageRank values.
There is a problem with the PageRank rule in this form. Consider the
network in Fig. 13.9, which is the same network as in Fig. 13.7 but with F
and G pointing to one another rather than pointing to A. This causes the
PageRanks to converge to 1 / 2 for F and G with 0 for all other nodes.
This means that any network containing reciprocating links will have
this clogging of PageRanks at such nodes. To prevent such a situation, the
PageRank rule is updated by introducing a scaling factor s that should be
strictly between 0 and 1. This gives us the following Scaled PageRank
Update rule . According to this rule, first apply the Basic PageRank Update
rule. Then scale down all PageRank values by a factor of s, thereby
shrinking the total PageRank from 1 to s. The residual $$1-s$$ units
of PageRank are divided equally over all the nodes, giving
$$(1-s)/n$$ to each.
Table 13.1 PageRank values of Fig. 13.7

Step A B C D E F G H
1 1/2 1 / 16 1 / 16 1 / 16 1 / 16 1 / 16 1 / 16 1 / 8
2 3 / 16 1 / 4 1/4 1 / 32 1 / 32 1 / 32 1 / 32 1 / 16

This scaling factor makes the PageRank measure less sensitive to the
addition or deletion of small number of nodes or edges.
A survey of the PageRank algorithm and its developments can be found
in [4].
We will first analyse the Basic PageRank Update rule and then move on
to the scaled version. Under the basic rule, each node takes its current
PageRank and divides it equally over all the nodes it points to. This
suggests that the “flow” of PageRank specified by the update rule can be
naturally represented using a matrix N. Let $$N_{ij}$$ be the share of
i’s PageRank that j should get in one update step. $$N_{ij} = 0$$ if i
doesn’t link to j, and when i links to j, then $$N_{ij} = 1/l_{i}$$,
where $$l_{i}$$ is the number of links out of i. (If i has no outgoing
links, then we define $$N_{ii} = 1$$, in keeping with the rule that a
node with no outgoing links passes all its PageRank to itself.)
If we represent the PageRank of all the nodes using a vector r, where
$$r_{i}$$ is the PageRank of node i. In this manner, the Basic
PageRank Update rule is
$$\begin{aligned} r \leftarrow N^{T} \cdot r \end{aligned}$$ (13.22)
We can similarly represent the Scaled PageRank Update rule using the
matrix $$\hat{N}$$ to denote the different flow of PageRank. To
account for the scaling, we define $$\hat{N_{ij}}$$ to be
$$sN_{ij}+(1-s)/n$$, this gives the scaled update rule as
(13.23)
 $$\begin{aligned} r \leftarrow \hat{N^{T}} \cdot r
\end{aligned}$$
Starting from an initial PageRank vector $$r^{[0]}$$, a sequence of
vectors $$r^{[1]},r^{[2]},\dots $$ are obtained from repeated
improvement by multiplying the previous vector by $$\hat{N^{T}}$$
. This gives us
$$\begin{aligned} r^{[k]} = (\hat{N^{T}})^{k}r^{[0]} (13.24)
\end{aligned}$$
This means that if the Scaled PageRank Update rule converges to a limiting
vector $$r^{[*]}$$, this limit would satisfy
$$\hat{N^{T}}r^{[*]} = r^{[*]}$$. This is proved using Perron’s
Theorem [18].

../images/462433_1_En_13_Chapter/462433_1_En_13_Fig8_HTML.gif
Fig. 13.8 Equilibrium PageRank values for the network in Fig. 13.7

../images/462433_1_En_13_Chapter/462433_1_En_13_Fig9_HTML.gif
Fig. 13.9 The same collection of eight pages, but F and G have changed their links to point to each
other instead of to A. Without a smoothing effect, all the PageRank would go to F and G

Reference [2] describes axioms that are satisfied by the PageRank

algorithm, and that any page ranking algorithm that satisfies these must
coincide with the PageRank algorithm.

13.1.4.3 Random Walk

Consider the situation where one randomly starts browsing a network of
Webpages. They start at a random page and pick each successive page with
equal probability. The links are followed for a sequence of k steps: in each
step, a random out-going link from the current page is picked. (If the
current page has no out-going links, they just stay where they are.)

Remark 1 Taking a random walk in this situation, the probability of being

at a page X after k steps of this random walk is precisely the PageRank of X
after k applications of the Basic PageRank Update rule.

Proof
If $$b_{1},b_{2},\dots ,b_{n}$$ denote the probabilities of the walk
being at nodes $$1,2,\dots ,n$$ respectively in a given step, then the
probability it will be at node i in the next step is computed as follows:
1.
For each node j that links to i, if we are given that the walk is currently
at node j, then there is a $$1/l_{j}$$ chance that it moves from j to i
in the next step, where $$l_{j}$$ is the number of links out of j.
2.
The walk has to actually be at node j for this to happen, so node j
contributes $$b_{j}(1/l_{j})=b_{j}/l_{j}$$ to the probability of
being at i in the next step.
3.
Therefore, summing $$b_{j}/l_{j}$$ over all nodes j that link to i
gives the probability the walk is at $$b_{i}$$ in the next step.
So the overall probability that the walk is at i in the next step is the sum of
$$b_{j}/l_{j}$$ over all nodes that link to i.
If we represent the probabilities of being at different nodes using a
vector b, where the coordinate $$b_{i}$$ is the probability of being at
node i, then this update rule can be written using matrix-vector
multiplication as
$$\begin{aligned} b \leftarrow N^{T} \cdot b \end{aligned}$$ (13.25)
This is exactly the same as Eq. 13.22. Since both PageRank values and
random-walk probabilities start out the same (they are initially 1 / n for all
nodes), and they then evolve according to exactly the same rule, so they
remain same forever. This justifies the claim.

Remark 2 The probability of being at a page X after k steps of the scaled

random walk is precisely the PageRank of X after k applications of the
Scaled PageRank Update Rule.

Proof
We go by the same lines as the proof of Remark 1. If
$$b_{1}, b_{2}, \dots , b_{n}$$ denote the probabilities of the walk
being at nodes $$1, 2, \dots , n$$ respectively in a given step, then the
probability it will be at node i in the next step, is the sum of
 $$sb_{j}/l_{j}$$, over all nodes j that link to i, plus $$(1 - s)/n$$. If we
use the matrix $$\hat{N}$$, then we can write the probability update as
$$\begin{aligned} b \leftarrow \hat{N^{T}}b \end{aligned}$$ (13.26)
This is the same as the update rule from Eq. 13.23 for the scaled PageRank
values. The random-walk probabilities and the scaled PageRank values start
at the same initial values, and then evolve according to the same update, so
they remain the same forever. This justifies the argument.

A problem with both PageRank and HITS is topic drift . Because they give
the same weights to all edges, the pages with the most in-links in the
network being considered tend to dominate, whether or not they are most
relevant to the query. References [8] and [5] propose heuristic methods for
differently weighting links. Reference [20] biased PageRank towards pages
containing a specific word, and [14] proposed applying an optimized
version of PageRank to the subset of pages containing the query terms.

13.1.4.4 SALSA Algorithm

Reference [17] proposed the SALSA algorithm which starts with a “Root
Set” short list of Webpages relevant to the given query retrieved from a
text-based search engine. This root set is augmented by pages which link to
pages in the Root Set, and also pages which are linked to pages in the Root
Set, to obtain a larger “Base Set” of Webpages. Perform a random walk on
this base set by alternately (a) going uniformly to one of the pages which
links to the current page, and (b) going uniformly to one of the pages linked
to by the current page. The authority weights are defined to be the
stationary distribution of the two-step chain first doing (a) and then (b),
while the hub weights are defined to be the stationary distribution of the
two-step chain first doing (b) and then (a).
Formally, let $$B(i) = \{k: k \rightarrow i\}$$ denote the set of all
nodes that point to i, i.e, the nodes we can reach from i by following a link
backwards, and let $$F(i) = \{k: i \rightarrow k\}$$ denote the set of
all nodes that we can reach from i by following a forward link. The Markov
Chain for the authorities has transition probabilities
$$\begin{aligned} P_{a}(i,j) = \sum \limits _{k:k\in B(i)\cap (13.27)
B(j)}\frac{1}{|B(i)|}\frac{1}{|F(k)|} \end{aligned}$$
If the Markov chain is irreducible, then the stationary distribution
$$a = (a_{1},a_{2},\dots ,a_{N})$$ of the Markov chain satisfies
$$a_{i} = |B(i)|/|B|$$, where $$B = \bigcup _{i}B(i)$$ is the set
of all backward links.
Similarly, the Markov chain for the hubs has transition probabilities
$$\begin{aligned} P_{h}(i,j) = \sum \limits _{k:k\in F(i)\cap (13.28)
F(j)}\frac{1}{|F(i)|}\frac{1}{|B(k)|} \end{aligned}$$
and the stationary distribution $$h = (h_{1},h_{2},\dots ,h_{N})$$ of
the Markov chain satisfies $$h_{i} = |F(i)|/|F|$$, where
$$F = \bigcup _{i}F(i)$$ is the set of all forward links.
In the special case of a single component, SALSA can be viewed as a
one-step truncated version of HITS algorithm, i.e, in the first iteration of
HITS algorithm, if we perform the Authority Update rule first, the authority
weights are set to $$a = A^{T}u$$, where u is the vector of all ones.
If we normalize in the $$L_{1}$$ norm, then
$$a_{i} = |B(i)|/|B|$$, which is the stationary distribution of the
SALSA algorithm. A similar observation can be made for the hub weights.
If the underlying graph of the Base Set consists of more than one
component, then the SALSA algorithm selects a starting point uniformly at
random, and performs a random walk within the connected component that
contains that node. Formally, let j be a component that contains node i, let
$$N_{j}$$ denote the number of nodes in the component, and
$$B_{j}$$ the set of (backward) links in component j. Then, the
authority weight of node i is
$$\begin{aligned} a_{i} = \frac{N_{j}}{N}\frac{|B(i)|}{|B_{j}|} (13.29)
\end{aligned}$$
A simplified version of the SALSA algorithm where the authority weight of
a node is the ratio |B(i)| / |B|, corresponds to the case that the starting point
for the random walk is chosen with probability proportional to its in-degree.
This variation of the SALSA algorithm is commonly referred to as
pSALSA.

13.1.4.5 PHITS Algorithm

Reference [10] proposed a statistical hubs and authorities algorithm called
PHITS algorithm. A probabilistic model was proposed in which a citation c
of a document d is caused by a latent “factor” or “topic”, z. It is postulated
that there are conditional distributions P(c|z) of a citation c given a factor z,
and also conditional distributions P(z|d) of a factor z given a document d. In
terms of these conditional distributions, they produce a likelihood function.
The EM Algorithm of [11] to assign the unknown conditional
probabilities so as to maximize this likelihood function L, best explained
the proposed data. Their algorithm requires specifying in advance the
number of factors z to be considered. Furthermore, it is possible that the EM
algorithm could get stuck in a local maximum, without converging to the
true global maximum.

13.1.4.6 Breadth First Algorithm: A Normalized n-step Variant

Reference [6] proposed a BFS algorithm, as a generalization of the
pSALSA algorithm, and a restriction of the HITS algorithm. The BFS
algorithm extends the idea of in-degree that appears in pSALSA from a one
link neighbourhood to a n-link neighbourhood. Here, we introduce the
following notations. If we follow a link backwards, then we call this a B
path, and if we follow a link forwards, we call it a F path. So, a BF path is a
path that first follows a link backwards, and then a link forward.
denotes the set of paths that go from i to j,
$$(BF)^{n}(i)$$ the set of $$(BF)^{n}$$ paths that leave node i, and
$$(BF)^{n}$$ the set of all possible $$(BF)^{n}$$ paths. Similar sets
can be defined for the $$(FB)^{n}$$ paths.
In this algorithm, instead of considering the number of
$$(BF)^{n}$$ paths that leave i, it considers the number of
$$(BF)^{n}$$ neighbours of node i. The contribution of node j to the
weight of node i depends on the distance of the node j from i. By adopting
an exponentially decreasing weighting scheme, the weight of node i is
determined as:
$$\begin{aligned} a_{i} = 2^{n-1}|B(i)|+2^{n-2}|BF(i)|+2^{n- (13.30)
3}|BFB(i)|+\dots +|(BF)^{n}(i)| \end{aligned}$$
The algorithm starts from node i, and visits its neighbours in BFS order. At
each iteration it takes a Backward or a Forward step (depending on whether
it is an odd, or an even iteration), and it includes the new nodes it
encounters. The weight factors are updated accordingly. Note that each
node is considered only once, when it is first encountered by the algorithm.
13.1.4.7 Bayesian Algorithm
Reference [6] also proposed a fully Bayesian statistical approach to
authorities and hubs. If there are M hubs and N authorities, we suppose that
each hub i has a real parameter $$e_{i}$$, corresponding to its tendency
to have hypertext links, and also a non-negative parameter $$h_{i}$$,
corresponding to its tendency to have intelligent hypertext links to
authoritative sites. Each authority j has a non-negative parameter
$$a_{j}$$, corresponding to its level of authority.
The statistical model is as follows. The a priori probability of a link
from hub i to authority j is given by
$$\begin{aligned} P(i \rightarrow j) =
\frac{exp(a_{j}h_{i}+e_{i})}{1+exp(a_{j}h_{i}+e_{i})} (13.31)
\end{aligned}$$
with the probability of no link from i to j given by
$$\begin{aligned} P(i \not \rightarrow j) = \frac{1} (13.32)
{1+exp(a_{j}h_{i}+e_{i})} \end{aligned}$$
This states that a link is more likely if $$e_{i}$$ is large (in which
case hub i has large tendency to link to any site), or if both $$h_{i}$$
and $$a_{j}$$ are large (in which case i is an intelligent hub, and j is
a high-quality authority).
We must now assign prior distributions to the $$2M + N$$
unknown parameters $$e_{i}$$, $$h_{i}$$, and
$$a_{j}$$. To do this, we let $$\mu = -5.0$$ and
$$\sigma = 0.1$$ be fixed parameters, and let each $$e_{i}$$
have prior distribution $$N(\mu , \sigma ^{2})$$, a normal
distribution with mean $$\mu $$ and variance $$\sigma ^{2}$$.
We further let each $$h_{i}$$ and $$a_{j}$$ have prior
distribution exp(1), meaning that for
$$x\ge 0, P(h_{i} \ge x) = P(a_{j} \ge x) = exp(-x)$$. The Bayesian
inference method then proceeds from this fully-specified statistical model,
by conditioning on the observed data, which in this case is the matrix A of
actual observed hypertext links in the Base Set. Specifically, when we
condition on the data A we obtain a posterior density
$$\prod : R^{2M +N} \rightarrow [0, \infty )$$ for the parameters
 $$(e_{1}, \dots , e_{M}, h_{1}, \dots , h_{M}, a_{1}, \dots ,
a_{N})$$
. This density is defined so that
$$\begin{aligned} \begin{aligned} P((e_{1},\dots
,e_{M},h_{1},\dots ,h_{M},a_{1},\dots ,a_{N})\in S|\{A_{ij}\}) \\
= \int _{S}\pi (e_{1},\dots ,e_{M},h_{1},\dots ,h_{M},a_{1},\dots (13.33)
,a_{N}) \\ de_{1}\dots de_{M}dh_{1}\dots dh_{M}da_{1}\dots
da_{N} \end{aligned} \end{aligned}$$
for any measurable subset $$S \subseteq R^{2M+N}$$, and also
$$\begin{aligned} \begin{aligned} E(g(e_{1},\dots
,e_{M},h_{1},\dots ,h_{M},a_{1},\dots ,a_{N})|\{A_{ij}\}) \\ =
\int _{R^{2M+N}}g(e_{1},\dots ,e_{M},h_{1},\dots (13.34)
,h_{M},a_{1},\dots ,a_{N}) \\ \pi (e_{1},\dots ,e_{M},h_{1},\dots
,h_{M},a_{1},\dots ,a_{N}) \\ de_{1}\dots de_{M}dh_{1}\dots
dh_{M}da_{1}\dots da_{N} \end{aligned} \end{aligned}$$
for any measurable function $$g:R^{2M+N}\rightarrow R$$.
The posterior density for the model is given up to a multiplicative
constant, by
$$\begin{aligned} \begin{aligned} \pi (e_{1},\dots
,e_{M},h_{1},\dots ,h_{M},a_{1},\dots ,a_{N}) \propto \prod
\limits _{i=0}^{M-1}exp(-h_{i})exp[-(e_{i}-\mu )^{2}/(2\sigma (13.35)
^{2})] \\ \times \prod \limits _{j=0}^{N-1}exp(-a_{j}) \times \prod
\limits _{(i,j):A_{ij}=1}exp(a_{j}h_{i}+e_{i})/\prod \limits _{all\
i,j}(1 + exp(a_{j}h_{i}+e_{i})) \end{aligned} \end{aligned}$$
The Bayesian algorithm then reports the conditional means of the
$$2M + N$$ parameters, according to the posterior density
$$\pi $$, i.e, it reports final values $$\hat{a_{j}}$$,
$$\hat{h_{i}}$$, and $$\hat{e_{i}}$$, where, for example
$$\begin{aligned} \begin{aligned} \hat{a_{j}} = \int
_{R^{2M+N}}a_{j}\pi (e_{1},\dots ,e_{M},h_{1},\dots (13.36)
,h_{M},a_{1},\dots ,a_{N}) \\ de_{1}\dots de_{M}dh_{1}\dots
dh_{M}da_{1}\dots da_{N} \end{aligned} \end{aligned}$$
A Metropolis algorithm is used to compute these conditional means.
This algorithm can be further simplified by replacing Eq. 13.31 with
$$P(i\rightarrow j) = (a_{j}h_{i})/(1+a_{j}h_{i})$$ and replacing
Eq. 13.32 with $$P(i\not \rightarrow j) = 1/(1+a_{j}h_{i})$$. This
eliminates the parameters $$e_{i}$$ entirely, so that prior values
$$\mu $$ and $$\sigma $$ are no longer needed. This leads to
the posterior density $$\pi (\cdot )$$, now given by
$$\pi : R^{M+N}\rightarrow R^{\ge 0}$$ where
$$\begin{aligned} \begin{aligned} \pi (h_{1},\dots
,h_{M},a_{1},\dots ,a_{N}) \propto \prod \limits _{i=0}^{M-
1}exp(-h_{i}) \times \prod \limits _{j=0}^{N-1}exp(-a_{j}) \times (13.37)
\prod \limits _{(i,j):A_{ij}=1}a_{j}h_{i} \\ /\prod \limits _{all\ i,j}
(1+a_{j}h_{i}) \end{aligned} \end{aligned}$$
Comparison of these algorithms can be found in [6].

13.2 Google
Reference [7] describes Google , a prototype of a large-scale search engine
which makes use of the structure present in hypertext. This prototype forms
the base of the Google search engine we know today.
Figure 13.10 illustrates a high level view of how the whole system
works. The paper states that most of Google was implemented in C or C++
for efficiency and was available to be run on either Solaris or Linux.

../images/462433_1_En_13_Chapter/462433_1_En_13_Fig10_HTML.gi
f
Fig. 13.10 High level Google architecture

The URL Server plays the role of the crawl control module here by
sending the list of URLs to be fetched by the crawlers. The Store Server
receives the fetched pages and compresses them before storing it in the
repository. Every Webpage has an associated ID number called a docID
which is assigned whenever a new URL is parsed out of a Webpage. The
Indexer module reads the repository, uncompresses the documents and
parses them. Each of these documents is converted to a set of word
occurrences called hits. The hit record the word, position in document,
approximation of the font size and capitalization. These hits are then
distributed into a set of Barrels , creating a partially sorted forward index.
The indexer also parses out all the links in every Webpage and stores
important information about them in anchor files placed in Anchors . These
anchor files contain enough information to determine where each link
points from and to, and the text of the link.
The URL Resolver reads these anchor files and converts relative URLs
into absolute URLs and in turn into docIDs. These anchor texts are put into
the forward index, associated with the docID that the anchor points to. It
also generates a database of links which are pairs of docIDs. The Links
database is used to compute PageRanks for all the documents. The Sorter
takes the barrels, which are sorted by docID, and resorts them by wordID to
generate the inverted index. The sorter also produces a list of wordIDs and
offsets into the inverted index. A program called DumpLexicon takes this
list together with the lexicon produced by the indexer and generates a new
lexicon to be used by the searcher. The Searcher is run by a Web server and
uses the lexicon built by DumpLexicon together with the inverted index and
the PageRanks to answer queries.

13.2.1 Data Structures

Almost all of the data is stored in BigFiles which are virtual files that can
span multiple file systems and support compression. The raw HTML
repository uses roughly half of the necessary storage. It consists of
concatenation of the compressed HTML of every page, preceded by a small
header. The DocIndex keeps information about each document. The
DocIndex is a fixed width Index Sequential Access Mode (ISAM) index,
ordered by docID. The information stored in each entry includes the current
document status, a pointer into the repository, a document checksum, and
various statistics. Variable width information such as URL and title is kept
in a separate file. There is also an auxiliary index to convert URLs into
docIDs. The lexicon has several different forms for different operations.
They all are memory-based hash tables with varying values attached to each
word.
Hit lists account for most of the space used in both the forward and the
inverted indices. Because of this, it is important to represent them as
efficiently as possible. Therefore, a hand optimized compact encoding is
used which uses two bytes for every hit. To save space, the length of the hit
list is stored before the hits and is combined with the wordID in the forward
index and the docID in the inverted index.
 The forward index is actually already partially sorted. It is stored in a
number of barrels. Each barrel holds a range of wordIDs. If a document
contains words that fall into a particular barrel, the docID is recorded into
the barrel, followed by a list of wordIDs with hitlists which correspond to
those words. This scheme requires slightly more storage because of
duplicated docIDs but the difference is very small for a reasonable number
of buckets and saves considerable time and coding complexity in the final
indexing phase done by the sorter. The inverted index consists of the same
barrels as the forward index. Except that they have been processed by the
sorter. For every valid wordID, the lexicon contains a pointer into the barrel
that wordID falls into. It points to a list of docIDs together with their
corresponding hit lists. This list is called a doclist and represents all the
occurrences of that word in all documents.
An important issue is in what order the docIDs should appear in the
doclist. One simple solution is to store them sorted by docID. This allows
for quick merging of different doclists for multiple word queries. Another
option is to store them sorted by a ranking of the occurrence of the word in
each document. This makes answering one word queries trivial and makes
it likely that the answers to multiple word queries are near the start.
However, merging is much more difficult. Also, this makes development
much more difficult in that a change to the ranking function requires a
rebuild of the index. A compromise between these options was chosen,
keeping two sets of inverted barrels - one set for hit lists which include title
or anchor hits and another set for all hit lists. This way, we check the first
set of barrels first and if there are not enough matches within those barrels
we check the larger ones.

13.2.2 Crawling
Crawling is the most fragile application since it involves interacting with
hundreds of thousands of Web servers and various name servers which are
all beyond the control of the system. In order to scale to hundreds of
millions of Webpages, Google has a fast distributed crawling system. A
single URLserver serves lists of URLs to a number of crawlers. Both the
URLserver and the crawlers were implemented in Python. Each crawler
keeps roughly 300 connections open at once. This is necessary to retrieve
Web pages at a fast enough pace. At peak speeds, the system can crawl over
100 Web pages per second using four crawlers. A major performance stress
is DNS lookup so each crawler maintains a DNS cache. Each of the
hundreds of connections can be in a number of different states: looking up
DNS, connecting to host, sending request. and receiving response. These
factors make the crawler a complex component of the system. It uses
asynchronous IO to manage events, and a number of queues to move page
fetches from state to state.

13.2.3 Searching
Every hitlist includes position, font, and capitalization information.
Additionally, hits from anchor text and the PageRank of the document are
factored in. Combining all of this information into a rank is difficult. The
ranking function so that no one factor can have too much influence. For
every matching document we compute counts of hits of different types at
different proximity levels. These counts are then run through a series of
lookup tables and eventually are transformed into a rank. This process
involves many tunable parameters.

13.3 Web Spam Pages

Web spam pages are notorious for using techniques to achieve higher-than-
deserved rankings in a search engine’s results. Reference [12] proposed a
technique to semi-automatically separate reputable pages from spam. First,
a small set of seed pages are evaluated to be good by a human expert. Once
these reputable seed pages have been identified, the link structure of the
Web is used to discover other pages that are likely to be good.
Humans can easily identify spam pages and a number of search engine
companies have been known to recruit people who have expertise in
identifying spam, and regularly scan the Web looking for such pages.
However, this is an expensive and time-consuming process but nevertheless
has to be done in order to ensure the quality of the search engine’s result.
The algorithm first selects a small seed set of pages whose spam status
needs to be determined by a human. Using this, the algorithm identifies
other pages that are likely to be good based on their connectivity with the
good seed pages.
The human checking of a page for spam is formalized as a oracle
function O over all pages $$p\in V$$
(13.38)
 $$\begin{aligned} O(p) = {\left\{ \begin{array}{ll} 0\ if\ p\ is\
bad \\ 1\ if\ p\ is\ good \end{array}\right. } \end{aligned}$$
Since oracle evaluations over all pages is an expensive ordeal, this is
avoided by asking the human to assign oracle values for just a few of the
pages.
To evaluate pages without relying on O, the likelihood that a given page
p is good is estimated using a trust function T which yields the probability
that a page is good, i.e, $$T(p) = P[O(p)=1]$$.
Although it would be difficult to come up with a function T, such a
function would be useful in ordering results. These functions could be
defined in terms of the following properties. We first look at the ordered
trust property
$$\begin{aligned} \begin{aligned} T(p)< T(q) \Leftrightarrow
P[O(p)=1] < P[O(q)=1] \\ T(p) = T(q) \Leftrightarrow P[O(p)=1] (13.39)
= P[O(q)=1] \end{aligned} \end{aligned}$$
By introducing a threshold value $$\delta $$, we define the threshold
trust property as
$$\begin{aligned} T(p) > \delta \Leftrightarrow O(p) = 1 (13.40)
\end{aligned}$$
A binary function I(T, O, p, q) to signal if the ordered trust property has
been violated.
$$\begin{aligned} I(T,O,p,q) = {\left\{ \begin{array}{ll} 1\ if\
T(p)\ge T(q)\ and\ O(p) < O(q) \\ 1\ if\ T(p)\le T(q)\ and\ O(p) (13.41)
> O(q) \\ 0\ otherwise \end{array}\right. } \end{aligned}$$
We now define a set of $$\mathcal {P}$$ of ordered pairs of pages
$$(p,q), p \ne q$$, and come up with the pairwise orderedness
function that computes the fraction of pairs for which T did not make a
mistake
$$\begin{aligned} pairord(T,O,\mathcal {P}) = \frac{|\mathcal
{P}|-\sum \limits _{(p,q)\in \mathcal {P}}I(T,O,p,q)}{|\mathcal (13.42)
{P}|} \end{aligned}$$
If pairord equals 1, there are no cases when misrated a pair. In contrast, if
pairord equals 0, then T misrated all the pairs.
We now proceed to define the trust functions. Given a budget L of O-
invocations, we select at random a seed set $$\mathcal {S}$$ of L
pages and call the oracle on its elements. The subset of good and bad seed
pages are denoted as $$\mathcal {S}^{+}$$ and
$$\mathcal {S}^{-}$$, respectively. Since the remaining pages are
not checked by human expert, these are assigned a trust score of 1 / 2 to
signal our lack of information. Therefore, this scheme is called the ignorant
trust function $$T_{0}$$ defined for any $$p\in V$$ as
$$\begin{aligned} T_{0}(p) = {\left\{ \begin{array}{ll} O(p)\ if\
p \in \mathcal {S} \\ 1/2\ otherwise \end{array}\right. } (13.43)
\end{aligned}$$
Now we attempt to compute the trust scores, by taking advantage of the
approximate isolation of good pages. We will select at random the set
$$\mathcal {S}$$ of L pages that we invoke the oracle on. Then,
expecting that good pages point to other good pages only, we assign a score
of 1 to all pages that are reachable from a page in
$$\mathcal {S}^{+}$$ in M or fewer steps. The M-step trust function
is defined as
$$\begin{aligned} T_{M}(p) = {\left\{ \begin{array}{ll} O(p)\ if\
p \in \mathcal {S} \\ 1\ if\ p \not \in \mathcal {S}\ and\ \exists q \in (13.44)
\mathcal {S}^{+}: q\rightsquigarrow _{M} p \\ 1/2\ otherwise
\end{array}\right. } \end{aligned}$$
where $$q\rightsquigarrow _{M}p$$ denotes the existence of a path
of maximum length of M from page q to page p. However, such a path must
not include bad seeds.
To reduce trust as we move further away from the good seed pages,
there are two possible schemes. The first is called the trust dampening . If a
page is one link away from a good seed page, it is assigned a dampened
trust score of $$\beta $$. A page that can reach another page with
score $$\beta $$, gets a dampened score of
$$\beta \cdot \beta $$.
The second technique is called trust splitting . Here, the trust gets split if
it propagates to other pages. If a page p has a trust score of T(p) and it
points to $$\omega (p)$$ pages, each of the $$\omega (p)$$
pages will receive a score fraction $$T(p)/\omega (p)$$ from p. In
this case, the actual score of a page will be the sum of the score fractions
received through its in-links.
 The next task is to identify pages that are desirable for the seed set. By
desirable, we mean pages that will be the most useful in identifying
additional good pages. However, we must ensure that the size of the seed
set is reasonably small to limit the number of oracle invocations. There are
two strategies for accomplishing this task.
The first technique is based on the idea that since trust flows out of the
good seed pages, we give preference to pages from which we can reach
many other pages. Building on this, we see that seed set can be built from
those pages that point to many pages that in turn point to many pages and so
on. This approach is the inverse of the PageRank algorithm because the
PageRank ranks pages based on its in-degree while here it is based in the
out-degree. This gives the technique the name inverted PageRank .
However, this method is a double-edged sword. While it does not guarantee
maximum coverage, its execution time is polynomial in the number of
pages.
The other technique is to take pages with high PageRank as the seed set,
since high-PageRank pages are likely to point to other high- PageRank
pages.
Piecing all of these elements together gives us the TrustRank algorithm.
The algorithm takes as input the graph. At the first step, it identifies the
seed set. The pages in the set are re-ordered in decreasing order of their
desirability score. Then, the oracle function is invoked on the L most
desirable seed pages. The entries of the static score distribution vector d that
correspond to good seed pages are set to 1. After normalizing the vector d
so that its entries sum to 1, the TrustRank scores are evaluated using a
biased PageRank computation with d replacing the uniform distribution.
Reference [13] complements [12] by proposing a novel method for
identifying the largest spam farms . A spam farm is a group of
interconnected nodes involved in link spamming. It has a single target node
, whose ranking the spammer intends to boost by creating the whole
structure. A farm also contains boosting nodes , controlled by the spammer
and connected so that they would influence the PageRank of the target.
Boosting nodes are owned either by the author of the target, or by some
other spammer. Commonly, boosting nodes have little value by themselves;
they only exist to improve the ranking of the target. Their PageRank tends
to be small, so serious spammers employ a large number of boosting nodes
(thousands of them) to trigger high target ranking.
 In addition to the links within the farm, spammers may gather some
external links from reputable nodes. While the author of a reputable node y
is not voluntarily involved in spamming, “stray” links may exist for a
number of reasons. A spammer may manage to post a comment that
includes a spam link in a reputable blog. Or a honey pot may be created, a
spam page that offers valuable information, but behind the scenes is still
part of the farm. Unassuming users might then point to the honey pot,
without realizing that their link is harvested for spamming purposes. The
spammer may purchase domain names that recently expired but had
previously been reputable and popular. This way he/she can profit of the old
links that are still out there.
A term called spam mass is introduced which is a measure of how much
PageRank a page accumulates through being linked to by spam pages. The
idea is that the target pages of spam farms, whose PageRank is boosted by
many spam pages, are expected to have a large spam mass. At the same
time, popular reputable pages, which have high PageRank because other
reputable pages point to them, have a small spam mass.
In order to compute this spam mass, we partition the Web into a set of
reputable node $$V^{+}$$ and a set of spam nodes $$V^{-}$$,
with $$V^{+}\cup V^{-} = V$$ and
$$V^{+}\cap V^{-} = \phi $$. Given this partitioning, the goal is to
detect web nodes x that gain most of their PageRank through spam nodes in
$$V^{-}$$ that link to them. Such nodes x are called spam farm target
nodes.
A simple approach would be that, given a node x, we look only at its
immediate in-neighbours. If we are provided information about whether or
not these in-neighbours are reputable or spam, we could infer whether or
not x is good or spam.
In a first approach, if majority of x’s links comes from spam nodes, x is
labelled a spam target node, otherwise it is labelled good. This scheme
could easily mislabel spam. An alternative is to look not only at the number
of links, but also at what amount of PageRank each link contributes. The
contribution of a link amounts to the change in PageRank induced by the
removal of the link. However, this scheme does not look beyond the
immediate in-neighbours of x and therefore could succumb to mislabelling.
This paves a way for a third scheme where a node x is labelled considering
all the PageRank contributions of other nodes that are directly or indirectly
connected to x.
The PageRank contribution of x to y over the walk W is defined as
$$\begin{aligned} q_{y}^{W} = s^{k}\pi (W)(1-s)v_{x} (13.45)
\end{aligned}$$
where $$v_{x}$$ is the probability of a random jump to x, and
$$\pi (W)$$ is the weight of the walk.
$$\begin{aligned} \pi (W) = \prod \limits _{i=0}^{k-1}\frac{1} (13.46)
{out(x_{i})} \end{aligned}$$
This weight can be interpreted as the probability that a Markov chain of
length k starting in x reaches y through the sequence of nodes
$$x_{1}, \dots , x_{k-1}$$.
This gives the total PageRank contribution of x to y, $$x \ne y$$,
over all walks from x to y as
$$\begin{aligned} q_{y}^{x} = \sum \limits _{W \in (13.47)
W_{xy}}q_{y}^{W} \end{aligned}$$
For a node’s contribution to itself, a virtual cycle $$Z_{x}$$ that has
length zero and weight 1 is considered such that
$$\begin{aligned} \begin{aligned} q_{x}^{x} = \sum \limits _{W
\in W_{xx}}q_{x}^{W} = q_{x}^{Z_{x}} + \sum \limits _{V \in (13.48)
W_{xx},|V| \ge 1}q_{x}^{V} \\ = (1-s)v_{x} + \sum \limits _{V \in
W_{xx},|V| \ge 1}q_{x}^{V} \end{aligned} \end{aligned}$$
If a node x does not participate in cycles, x’s contribution to itself is
$$q_{x}^{x} = (1-s)v_{x}$$, which corresponds to the random jump
component. If these is no walk from node x to y then the PageRank
contribution $$q_{y}^{x}$$ is zero.
This gives us that the PageRank score of a node y is the sum of the
contributions of all other nodes to y
$$\begin{aligned} p_{y} = \sum \limits _{x\in V}q_{y}^{x} (13.49)
\end{aligned}$$
Under a given random jump distribution v, the vector $$q^{x}$$ of
contributions of a node x to all nodes is the solution of the linear PageRank
system for the core-based random jump vector $$v^{x}$$
(13.50)
 $$\begin{aligned} v_{y}^{x} = {\left\{ \begin{array}{ll} v_{x}\
if\ x = y \\ 0\ otherwise \end{array}\right. } \implies q^{x} =
PR(v^{x}) \end{aligned}$$
From this, we can compute the PageRank contribution $$q^{U}$$ of
any subset of nodes $$U \subseteq V$$ by computing the PageRank
using the random jump vector $$v^{U}$$ defined as
$$\begin{aligned} v_{y}^{U} = {\left\{ \begin{array}{ll} v_{y}\ (13.51)
if\ y \in U \\ 0\ otherwise \end{array}\right. } \end{aligned}$$
We will now use this to compute the spam mass of a page. For a given
partitioning $$\{V^{+},V^{-}\}$$ of V and for any node x,
$$p_{x} = q_{x}^{V^{+}}+q_{x}^{V^{-}}$$, i.e, x’s PageRank is
the sum of the contributions of good and that of spam nodes. The absolute
spam mass of a node x, denoted by $$M_{x}$$, is the PageRank
contribution that x receives from spam nodes, i.e,
$$M_{x} = q_{x}^{V^{-}}$$. Therefore, the spam mass is a
measure of how much direct or indirect in-neighbour spam nodes increase
the PageRank of a node. The relative spam mass of node x, denoted by
$$m_{x}$$, is the fraction of x’s PageRank due to contributing spam
nodes, i.e, $$m_{x} = q_{x}^{V^{-}}/p_{x}$$.
If we assume that only a subset of the good nodes
$$\tilde{V^{+}}$$ is given, we can compute two sets of PageRanks
scores. $$p = PR(v)$$ is the PageRank of nodes based on the uniform
random jump distribution $$v = (1/n)^{n}$$, and
$$p' = PR(v^{\tilde{V^{+}}})$$ is a core-based PageRank with a
random jump distribution $$v^{\tilde{V^{+}}}$$
$$\begin{aligned} v_{x}^{\tilde{V^{+}}} = {\left\{
\begin{array}{ll} 1/n\ if\ x \in \tilde{V^{+}} \\ 0\ otherwise (13.52)
\end{array}\right. } \end{aligned}$$
Given the PageRank scores $$p_{x}$$ and $$p'_{x}$$, the
estimated absolute spam mass of node x is
$$\begin{aligned} \tilde{M_{x}} = p_{x} - p'_{x} (13.53)
\end{aligned}$$
and the estimated spam mass of x is
$$\begin{aligned} \tilde{m_{x}} = (p_{x} - p'_{x})/p_{x} = 1 - (13.54)
p'_{x}/p_{x} \end{aligned}$$
Instead, if $$\tilde{V^{-}}$$ is provided, the absolute spam mass can
be estimated by $$\hat{M} = PR(v^{\tilde{V^{-}}})$$. When both
$$V^{-}$$ and $$V^{+}$$ are known, the spam mass estimates
could be derived by simply computing the average
$$(\tilde{M} + \hat{M})/2$$.
Now, we consider the situation where the core $$\tilde{V^{+}}$$
is significantly smaller than the actual set of good nodes $$V^{+}$$,
i.e, $$|\tilde{V^{+}}|<< |V^{+}|$$ and thus
$$||v^{V^{+}}||<< ||v||$$. Since $$p = PR(v)$$,
$$||p|| \le ||v||$$ and similarly $$||p'|| \le ||v^{\tilde{V^{+}}}||$$.
This means that $$||p'||<< ||p||$$, i.e, the total estimated good
contribution is much smaller than the total PageRank of nodes. Therefore,
we will have $$||p-p'|| \approx ||p||$$ with only a few nodes that have
absolute mass estimates differing from their PageRank scores.
To counter this problem, we construct a uniform random sample of
nodes and manually label each sample node as spam or good. This way it is
possible to roughly approximate the prevalence of spam nodes on the Web.
We introduce $$\gamma $$ to denote the fraction of nodes that we
estimate that are good, so $$\gamma n \approx |V^{+}|$$. Then, we
scale the core-based random jump vector $$v^{\tilde{V^{+}}}$$ to
w, where
$$\begin{aligned} w_{x} = {\left\{ \begin{array}{ll} \gamma
/|\tilde{V^{+}}|\ if\ x \in \tilde{V^{+}} \\ 0\ otherwise (13.55)
\end{array}\right. } \end{aligned}$$
Note that $$||w|| = \gamma \approx ||v^{V^{+}}||$$, so the two
random jump vectors are of the same order of magnitude. Then, we can
compute $$p'$$ based on w and expect that
$$||p'|| \approx ||p^{V^{+}}||$$, so we get a reasonable estimate of the
total good contribution.
Using w in computing the core-based PageRank leads to the following:
as $$\tilde{V^{+}}$$ is small, the good nodes in it will receive an
unusually high random jump ( $$\gamma /|\tilde{V^{+}}|$$ as
opposed to 1 / n). Therefore, the good PageRank contribution of these
known reputable nodes will be overestimated, to the extent that
occasionally for some node y, $$p'_{y}$$ will be larger than
$$p_{y}$$. Hence, when computing $$\tilde{M}$$, there will
be nodes with negative spam mass . In general, a negative mass indicates
that a node is known to be good in advance (is a member of
$$\tilde{V^{+}}$$) or its PageRank is heavily influenced by the
contribution of nodes in the good core.
Now we can discuss the mass-based spam detection algorithm. It takes
as input a good core $$\tilde{V^{+}}$$, a threshold $$\tau $$
to which the relative mass estimates are compared, and a PageRank
threshold $$\rho $$. If the estimated relative mass of a node is equal
to or above this $$\tau $$ then the node is labelled as a spam
candidate. Only the relative mass estimates of nodes with PageRank scores
larger than or equal to $$\rho $$ are verified. Nodes with PageRank
less than $$\rho $$ are never labelled as spam candidates.

Problems
Download the Wikipedia hyperlinks network available at
https://snap.stanford.edu/data/wiki-topcats.txt.gz.

63 Generate the graph of the network in this dataset.

64 Compute the PageRank, hub score and authority score for each of the
nodes in the graph.

65 Report the nodes that have the top 3 PageRank, hub and authority
scores respectively.

References
1. Agirre, Eneko, Mona Diab, Daniel Cer, and Aitor Gonzalez-Agirre. 2012. Semeval-2012 task 6:
a pilot on semantic textual similarity. In Proceedings of the first joint conference on lexical and
computational semantics-volume 1: Proceedings of the main conference and the shared task, and
Volume 2: Proceedings of the sixth international workshop on semantic evaluation, 385–393.
Association for Computational Linguistics.

2. Altman, Alon, and Moshe Tennenholtz. 2005. Ranking systems: the pagerank axioms. In
Proceedings of the 6th ACM conference on electronic commerce, 1–8. ACM.

3. Arasu, Arvind, Junghoo Cho, Hector Garcia-Molina, Andreas Paepcke, and Sriram Raghavan.
2001. Searching the web. ACM Transactions on Internet Technology (TOIT) 1 (1): 2–43.
[Crossref]
4.
Berkhin, Pavel. 2005. A survey on pagerank computing. Internet Mathematics 2 (1): 73–120.
 [MathSciNet][Crossref]

5. Bharat, Krishna, and Monika R. Henzinger. 1998. Improved algorithms for topic distillation in a
hyperlinked environment. In Proceedings of the 21st annual international ACM SIGIR
conference on research and development in information retrieval, 104–111. ACM.

6. Borodin, Allan, Gareth O. Roberts, Jeffrey S. Rosenthal, and Panayiotis Tsaparas. 2001. Finding
authorities and hubs from link structures on the world wide web. In Proceedings of the 10th
international conference on World Wide Web, 415–429. ACM.

7. Brin, Sergey, and Lawrence Page. 1998. The anatomy of a large-scale hypertextual web search
engine. Computer networks and ISDN systems 30 (1–7): 107–117.
[Crossref]

8. Chakrabarti, Soumen, Byron Dom, Prabhakar Raghavan, Sridhar Rajagopalan, David Gibson,
and Jon Kleinberg. 1998. Automatic resource compilation by analyzing hyperlink structure and
associated text. Computer Networks and ISDN Systems 30 (1–7): 65–74.
[Crossref]

9. Cho, Junghoo, and Hector Garcia-Molina. 2003. Estimating frequency of change. ACM
Transactions on Internet Technology (TOIT) 3 (3): 256–290.
[Crossref]

10. Cohn, David, and Huan Chang. 2000. Learning to probabilistically identify authoritative
documents. In ICML, 167–174. Citeseer.

11. Dempster, Arthur P., Nan M. Laird, and Donald B. Rubin. 1977. Maximum likelihood from
incomplete data via the em algorithm. Journal of the Royal Statistical Society. Series B
(methodological) 1–38.

12. Gyöngyi, Zoltán, Hector Garcia-Molina, and Jan Pedersen. 2004. Combating web spam with
trustrank. In Proceedings of the thirtieth international conference on very large data bases-
volume 30, 576–587. VLDB Endowment.

13. Gyongyi, Zoltan, Pavel Berkhin, Hector Garcia-Molina, and Jan Pedersen. 2006. Link spam
detection based on mass estimation. In Proceedings of the 32nd international conference on very
large data bases, 439–450. VLDB Endowment.

14. Haveliwala, Taher H. 2002. Topic-sensitive pagerank. In Proceedings of the 11th international
conference on World Wide Web, 517–526. ACM.

15. Hirai, Jun, Sriram Raghavan, Hector Garcia-Molina, and Andreas Paepcke. 2000. Webbase: a
repository of web pages. Computer Networks 33 (1–6): 277–293.
[Crossref]

16. Kleinberg, Jon M. 1998. Authoritative sources in a hyperlinked environment. In In Proceedings

of the ACM-SIAM symposium on discrete algorithms, Citeseer.

17. Lempel, Ronny, and Shlomo Moran. 2000. The stochastic approach for link-structure analysis
(salsa) and the tkc effect1. Computer Networks 33 (1–6): 387–401.
[Crossref]
18.
 MacCluer, Charles R. 2000. The many proofs and applications of perron’s theorem. Siam Review
42 (3): 487–498.

19. Melink, Sergey, Sriram Raghavan, Beverly Yang, and Hector Garcia-Molina. 2001. Building a
distributed full-text index for the web. ACM Transactions on Information Systems (TOIS) 19 (3):
217–241.
[Crossref]

20. Rafiei, Davood, and Alberto O. Mendelzon. 2000. What is this page known for? computing web
page reputations. Computer Networks 33 (1–6): 823–835.

21. Ribeiro-Neto, Berthier A., and Ramurti A. Barbosa. 1998. Query performance for tightly coupled
distributed digital libraries. In Proceedings of the third ACM conference on digital libraries,
182–190. ACM.

22. Tomasic, Anthony, and Hector Garcia-Molina. 1993. Performance of inverted indices in shared-
nothing distributed text document information retrieval systems. In Proceedings of the second
international conference on parallel and distributed information systems, 8–17. IEEE.
© Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2018
Krishna Raj P.M., Ankith Mohan and K.G. Srinivasa, Practical Social Network Analysis with Python,
Computer Communications and Networks
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-96746-2_14

14. Community Detection

Krishna Raj P. M.1 , Ankith Mohan1 and K. G. Srinivasa2

(1) Department of ISE, Ramaiah Institute of Technology, Bangalore,

Karnataka, India
(2) Department of Information Technology, C.B.P. Government
Engineering College, Jaffarpur, Delhi, India

Krishna Raj P. M.
Email: krishnarajpm@gmail.com

14.1 Strength of Weak Ties

As part of his Ph.D. thesis research in the late 1960s, Mark Granovetter
interviewed people who had recently changed employers to learn how they
discovered their new jobs [4]. He learnt that many of them learnt about the
jobs through personal contacts. These personal contacts were more often
than not an acquaintance rather than a close friend. Granovetter found this
rather surprising because one would suppose that close friends are the most
motivated in helping a person find a job, so why is it that acquaintances are
actually the ones who help land the job?
The answer that Granovetter proposed links two different perspectives
on acquaintanceship. One is structural, focusing on the way the connections
span different portions of the full network; and the other is interpersonal,
which is concerned with the local consequences that follow from the
friendship. Before dwelling any further on this question, we will go over an
important concept.

14.1.1 Triadic Closure

The triadic closure property states that if two individuals in a social network
have a mutual friend, then there is an increased likelihood that they will
become friends themselves. Figure 14.1 shows a graph with vertices A, B, C
and D with edges between A and B, B and C, C and D, and A and D. By
triadic closure property, edges A and C will be formed because of the
presence of mutual friends B and D. Similarly, due to A and C, an edge will
exist between B and D. These edges are depicted in Fig. 14.2.

../images/462433_1_En_14_Chapter/462433_1_En_14_Fig1_HTML.gif
Fig. 14.1 Undirected graph with four vertices and four edges. Vertices A and C have a mutual
contacts B and D, while B and D have mutual friend A and C

../images/462433_1_En_14_Chapter/462433_1_En_14_Fig2_HTML.gif
Fig. 14.2 Figure 14.1 with an edge between A and C, and B and D due to triadic closure property

Granovetter postulated that triadic closure was one of the most crucial
reason why acquaintances are the ones to thank for a person’s new job.
Consider the graph in Fig. 14.3, B has edges to the tightly-knit group
containing A, D and C, and also has an edge to E. The connection of B to E
is qualitatively different from the links to the tightly-knit group, because the
opinions and information that B and the group have access to are similar.
The information that E will provide to B will be things that B will not
necessarily have access to.
We define an edge to be a local bridge is the end vertices of the edge do
not have mutual friends. By this definition, the edge between B and E is a
local bridge. Observe that local bridge and triadic closure are conceptually
opposite term. While triadic closure implies an edge between vertices
having mutual friends, local bridge does not form an edge between such
vertices. So, Granovetter’s observation was that acquaintances connected to
an individual by local bridges can provide information such as job openings
which the individual might otherwise not have access to because the tightly-
knit group, although with greater motivation to find their buddy a job, will
know roughly the same things that the individual is exposed to.

../images/462433_1_En_14_Chapter/462433_1_En_14_Fig3_HTML.gif
Fig. 14.3 Graph with a local bridge between B and E
 When going about edges in formal terms, acquaintanceships are
considered as weak ties while friendships in closely-knit groups are called
strong ties . Let us assume that we are given the strength of each tie in
Fig. 14.3 (shown in Fig. 14.4). So, if a vertex A has edges to both B and C,
then the B-C edge is likely to form if A’s edges to B and C are both strong
ties. This could be considered a similarity to the theory of structural balance
studied in Chap. 7, where the affinity was to keep triads balanced by
promoting positive edges between each pair of vertices in the triangle.

../images/462433_1_En_14_Chapter/462433_1_En_14_Fig4_HTML.gif
Fig. 14.4 Each edge of the graph in Fig 14.3 is labelled either as a strong tie(S) or a weak tie(W).
The labelling in the figure satisfies the Strong Triadic Closure property

This gives us the following statement: If a node A in a network satisfies

the Strong Triadic Closure property and is involved in at least two strong
ties, then any local bridge it is involved in must be a weak tie.
Putting all of this together, we get that an edge is either a strong tie or a
weak tie, and it is either a local bridge or it isn’t.
The neighbourhood overlap of an edge connecting two nodes A and B is
defined to be the ratio
$$\begin{aligned} \frac{number\ of\ vertices\ who\ are\
neighbours\ of\ both\ A\ and\ B}{number\ of\ vertices\ who\ are\ (14.1)
neighbours\ of\ at\ least\ one\ of\ A\ or\ B} \end{aligned}$$
Consider the edge (B, F) in Fig. 14.3. The denominator of the
neighbourhood overlap is determined by the vertices A, C, D, E and G,
since they are the neighbours of either B or F. Of these only A is a
neighbour of both B and F. Therefore, the neighbourhood overlap of (B, F)
is 1 / 5.
Similarly, the neighbourhood overlap of (B, E) is zero. This is because
these vertices have no neighbour in common. Therefore, we can conclude
that a local bridge has zero neighbourhood overlap.
The neighbourhood overlap can be used as a quantitative way of
determining the strength of an edge in the network.

14.2 Detecting Communities in a Network

To identify groups in a network we will first have to formulate an approach
to partition the graph.
One class of methods to partition graphs is to identify and remove the
“spanning” links between densely-connected regions. Once these links are
removed, the graph breaks into disparate pieces. This process can be done
recursively. These methods are referred to as divisive methods of graph
partitioning.
An alternate class of methods aims at identifying nodes that are likely to
belong to the same region and merge them together. This results in a large
number of chunks, each of which are then merged in a bottom-up approach.
Such methods are called agglomerative methods of graph partitioning.
One traditional method of agglomerative clustering is hierarchical
clustering . In this technique, we first calculate the weight
$$W_{ij}$$ for each pair i,j of vertices in the network, which gives a
sense of how similar these two vertices are when compared to other
vertices. Then, we take the n vertices in the network, with no edge between
them, and add edges between pairs one after another in order of their
weights, starting with the pair with the strongest weight and progressing to
the weakest. As edges are added, the resulting graph shows a nested set of
increasingly large components, which are taken to be the communities.
Since the components are properly nested, they can all be represented using
a tree called “dendrograms” , in which the lowest level at which two
vertices are connected represents the strength of the edge which resulted in
their first becoming members of the same community. A “slice” through
this tree at any level gives the communities which existed just before an
edge of the corresponding weight was added.
Several different weights have been proposed for the hierarchical
clustering algorithm. One possible definition of the weight is the number of
node-independent paths between vertices. Two paths which connect the
same pair of vertices are said to be node-independent if they share none of
the same vertices other than their initial and final vertices. The number of
node-independent paths between vertices i and j in a graph is equal to the
minimum number of vertices that need be removed from the graph in order
to disconnect i and j from one another. Thus this number is in a sense a
measure of the robustness of the network to deletion of nodes.
Another possible way to define weights between vertices is to count the
total number of paths that run between them. However, since the number of
paths between any two vertices is infinite (unless it is zero), we typically
weigh paths of length l by a factor $$\alpha ^{l}$$ with
$$\alpha $$ small, so that the weighted count of the number of paths
converges. Thus long paths contribute exponentially less weight than short
ones. If A is the adjacency matrix of the network, such that
$$A_{ij}$$ is 1 if there is an edge between vertices i and j and 0
otherwise, then the weights in this definition are given by the elements of
the matrix
$$\begin{aligned} W = \sum \limits _{l=0}^{\infty }(\alpha A)^{l} (14.2)
= [I-\alpha A]^{-1} \end{aligned}$$
In order for the sum to converge, we must choose $$\alpha $$ smaller
than the reciprocal of the largest eigenvalue of A.
However, these definitions of weights are less successful in certain
situations. For instance, if a vertex is connected to the rest of a network by
only a single edge then, to the extent that it belongs to any community, it
should clearly be considered to belong to the community at the other end of
that edge. Unfortunately, both the numbers of node-independent paths and
the weighted path counts for such vertices are small and hence single nodes
often remain isolated from the network when the communities are formed.

14.2.1 Girvan-Newman Algorithm

Reference [2] proposed the following method for detecting communities.
The betweenness value of an edge is defined as the number of shortest paths
between pairs of vertices that pass through it. If there is more than one
shortest path between a pair of vertices, each of these paths is given equal
weight such that the total weight of all the paths is unity. The intuition is
that if a network contains communities or groups that are only loosely
connected by a few inter-group edges, then all shortest paths between
different communities must go along one of these few edges. Thus, the
edges connecting communities will have high edge betweenness. By
removing these edges, the groups are separated from one another and so the
underlying community structure of the graph is revealed.
The algorithm for identifying communities using the edge betweenness
values is called the Girvan-Newman algorithm and is stated as follows:
1.
Calculate the betweenness values for all the edges in the network.
2. Remove the edge with the highest betweenness value.

3.
Recalculate the betweenness for all edges affected by the removal.
4.
Repeat from step 2 until no edges remain.
The algorithm in [5] can calculate the betweenness for all the |E| edges
in a graph of |V| vertices in time O(|V||E|). Since the calculation has to be
repeated once for the removal of each edge, the entire algorithm runs in
worst-case time $$O(|E|^{2}|V|)$$.
However, Girvan-Newman algorithm runs in $$O(|V|^{3})$$ time
on sparse graphs, which makes it impractical for very large graphs.

14.2.2 Modularity
Reference [2] proposed a measure called “modularity” and suggested that
the optimization of this quality function over the possible divisions of the
network is an efficient way to detect communities in a network. The
modularity is, up to a multiplicative constant, the number of edges falling
within groups minus the expected number in an equivalent network with
edges placed at random. The modularity can be either positive or negative,
with positive values indicating the possible presence of community
structure. Thus, we can search for community structure precisely by looking
for the divisions of a network that have positive, and preferably large,
values of the modularity.
Let us suppose that all the vertices in our graph belongs to one of two
groups, i.e, $$s_{i} = 1$$ if vertex i belongs to group 1 and
$$s_{i} = -1$$ if it belongs to group 2. Let the number of vertices
between vertices i and j be $$A_{ij}$$, which will normally be 0 or
1, although larger values are possible for graphs with multiple edges. The
expected number of edges between vertices i and j if edges are placed at
random is $$k_{i}k_{j}/2|E|$$ where $$k_{i}$$ and
$$k_{j}$$ are the degrees of vertices i and j respectively, and
$$E = \sum _{i}k_{i}/2$$. The modularity Q is given by the sum of
$$A_{ij}-k_{i}k_{j}/2|E|$$ over all pairs of vertices i and j that fall
in the same group.
 Observing that the quantity $$\frac{1}{2}(s_{i}s_{j}+1)$$ is 1 if
i and j are in the same group and 0 otherwise, the modularity is formally
expressed as
$$\begin{aligned} Q = \frac{1}{4|E|}\sum \limits _{ij}\left(
A_{ij}-\frac{k_{i}k_{j}}{2|E|}\right) (s_{i}s_{j}+1) = \frac{1} (14.3)
{4|E|}\sum \limits _{ij}\left( A_{ij}-\frac{k_{i}k_{j}}{2|E|}\right)
s_{i}s_{j} \end{aligned}$$
where the second equality follows from the observation that
$$2|E| = \sum _{i}k_{i} = \sum _{ij}A_{ij}$$.
Equation 14.3 can be written in matrix form as
$$\begin{aligned} Q = \frac{1}{4|E|}s^{T}Bs \end{aligned}$$ (14.4)
where s is the column vector whose elements are $$s_{i}$$ and have
defined a real symmetric matrix B with elements
$$\begin{aligned} B_{ij} = A_{ij} - \frac{k_{i}k_{j}}{2|E|} (14.5)
\end{aligned}$$
which is called the modularity matrix . The elements of each of its rows and
columns sum to zero, so that it always has an eigenvector
$$(1,1,1,\ldots )$$ with eigenvalue zero.
Given Eq. 14.4, s can be written as a linear combination of the
normalized eigenvectors $$u_{i}$$ of B so that
$$s = \sum _{i=1}^{|V|}a_{i}u_{i}$$ with
$$a_{i} = u_{i}^{T}\cdot s$$, we get
$$\begin{aligned} Q = \frac{1}{4|E|}\sum \limits
_{i}a_{i}u_{i}^{T}B\sum \limits _{j}a_{j}u_{j} = \frac{1} (14.6)
{4|E|}\sum \limits _{i=1}^{|V|}(u_{i}^{T}\cdot s)^{2}\beta _{i}
\end{aligned}$$
where $$\beta _{i}$$ is the eigenvalue of B corresponding to
eigenvector $$u_{i}$$.
Assume that the eigenvalues are labelled in decreasing order,
$$\beta _{1}\ge \beta _{2}\ge \cdots \ge \beta _{|V|}$$. To maximize
the modularity, we have to choose the value of s that concentrates as much
weight as possible in terms of the sum in Eq. 14.6 involving the largest
eigenvalues. If there were no other constraints on the choice of s, this would
be an easy task: we would simply chose s proportional to the eigenvector
$$u_{1}$$. This places all of the weight in the term involving the
largest eigenvalue $$\beta _{1}$$, the other terms being
automatically zero, because the eigenvectors are orthogonal.
There is another constraint on the problem imposed by the restriction of
the elements of s to the values $$\pm 1$$, which means s cannot
normally be chosen parallel to $$u_{1}$$ . To make it as close to
parallel as possible, we have to maximize the dot product
$$u_{1}^{T}\cdot s$$. It is straightforward to see that the maximum
is achieved by setting $$s_{i}=+1$$ if the corresponding element of
$$u_{1}$$ is positive and $$s_{i}=-1$$ otherwise. In other
words, all vertices whose corresponding elements are positive go in one
group and all of the rest in the other. This gives us the algorithm for
dividing the network: we compute the leading eigenvector of the modularity
matrix and divide the vertices into two groups according to the signs of the
elements in this vector.
There are some satisfying features of this method. First, it works even
though the sizes of the communities are not specified. Unlike conventional
partitioning methods that minimize the number of between-group edges,
there is no need to constrain the group sizes or artificially forbid the trivial
solution with all vertices in a single group. There is an eigenvector
$$(1,1,1,\ldots )$$ corresponding to such a trivial solution, but its
eigenvalue is zero. All other eigenvectors are orthogonal to this one and
hence must possess both positive and negative elements. Thus, as long as
there is any positive eigenvalue this method will not put all vertices in the
same group.
It is, however, possible for there to be no positive eigenvalues of the
modularity matrix. In this case the leading eigenvector is the vector
$$(1,1,1,\ldots )$$ corresponding to all vertices in a single group
together. But this is precisely the correct result: the algorithm is in this case
telling us that there is no division of the network that results in positive
modularity, as can immediately be seen from Eq. 14.6, because all terms in
the sum will be zero or negative. The modularity of the undivided network
is zero, which is the best that can be achieved. This is an important feature
of the algorithm. The algorithm has the ability not only to divide networks
effectively, but also to refuse to divide them when no good division exists.
The networks in this latter case will be called indivisible , i.e, a network is
indivisible if the modularity matrix has no positive eigenvalues. This idea
will play a crucial role in later developments.
 The algorithm as described makes use only of the signs of the elements
of the leading eigenvector, but the magnitudes convey information, too.
Vertices corresponding to elements of large magnitude make large
contributions to the modularity, Eq. 14.6, and conversely for small ones.
Alternatively, if we take the optimal division of a network into two groups
and move a vertex from one group to the other, the vector element for that
vertex gives an indication of how much the modularity will decrease:
vertices corresponding to elements of large magnitude cannot be moved
without incurring a large modularity penalty, whereas those corresponding
to smaller elements can be moved at relatively little cost. Thus, the
elements of the leading eigenvector measure how firmly each vertex
belongs to its assigned community, those with large vector elements being
strong central members of their communities, whereas those with smaller
elements are more ambivalent.
When dealing with networks that can be divided into more than two
communities, we use the algorithm of the previous section first to divide the
network into two parts, then divide those parts, and so forth. However, after
first dividing a network in two, it is not correct to simply delete the edges
falling between the two parts and then apply the algorithm again to each
subgraph. This is because the degrees appearing in the definition, Eq. 14.3,
of the modularity will change if edges are deleted, and any subsequent
maximization of modularity would thus maximize the wrong quantity.
Instead, the correct approach is to write the additional contribution
$$\Delta Q$$ to the modularity upon further dividing a group g of
size $$|V|_{g}$$ in two as
$$\begin{aligned} \Delta Q&= \frac{1}{2|E|}\left[ \frac{1}
{2}\sum \limits _{i,j\in g}B_{ij}(s_{i}s_{j}+1)-\sum \limits _{i,j\in
g}B_{ij}\right] \nonumber \\&= \frac{1}{4|E|}\left[ \sum \limits
_{i,j\in g}B_{ij}s_{i}s_{j}-\sum \limits _{i,j\in g}B_{ij}\right] (14.7)
\\&= \frac{1}{4|E|}\sum \limits _{i,j\in g}\left[ B_{ij}-\delta
_{ij}\sum \limits _{k\in g}B_{ik}\right] s_{i}s_{j} \nonumber
\\&= \frac{1}{4|E|}s^{T}B^{(g)}s \nonumber \end{aligned}$$
where $$\delta _{ij}$$ is the Kronecker $$\delta $$-symbol,
$$B^{(g)}$$ is the $$n_{g}\times n_{g}$$ matrix with
elements indexed by the labels i, j of vertices within group g and having
values
(14.8)
 $$\begin{aligned} B_{ij}^{(g)} = B_{ij}-\delta _{ij}\sum \limits
_{k\in g}B_{ik} \end{aligned}$$
Since Eq. 14.7 has the same form as Eq. 14.4, we can now apply the
spectral approach to this generalized modularity matrix, just as before, to
maximize $$\Delta Q$$. Note that the rows and columns of
$$B^{(g)}$$ still sum to zero and that $$\Delta Q$$ is correctly
zero if group g is undivided. Note also that for a complete network Eq. 14.8
reduces to the previous definition of the modularity matrix, Eq. 14.5,
because $$\sum _{k}B_{ik}$$ is zero in that case.
In repeatedly subdividing the network, an important question we need to
address is at what point to halt the subdivision process. A nice feature of
this method is that it provides a clear answer to this question: if there exists
no division of a subgraph that will increase the modularity of the network,
or equivalently that gives a positive value for $$\Delta Q$$, then there
is nothing to be gained by dividing the subgraph and it should be left alone;
it is indivisible in the sense of the previous section. This happens when
there are no positive eigenvalues to the matrix $$B^{(g)}$$, and thus
the leading eigenvalue provides a simple check for the termination of the
subdivision process: if the leading eigenvalue is zero, which is the smallest
value it can take, then the subgraph is indivisible.
Note, however, that although the absence of positive eigenvalues is a
sufficient condition for indivisibility, it is not a necessary one. In particular,
if there are only small positive eigenvalues and large negative ones, the
terms in Eq. 14.6 for negative $$\beta _{i}$$ may outweigh those for
positive. It is straightforward to guard against this possibility, however; we
simply calculate the modularity contribution $$\Delta Q$$ for each
proposed split directly and confirm that it is greater than zero.
Thus the algorithm is as follows. We construct the modularity matrix,
Eq. 14.5, for the network and find its leading (most positive) eigenvalue and
the corresponding eigenvector. We divide the network into two parts
according to the signs of the elements of this vector, and then repeat the
process for each of the parts, using the generalized modularity matrix,
Eq. 14.8. If at any stage we find that a proposed split makes a zero or
negative contribution to the total modularity, we leave the corresponding
subgraph undivided. When the entire network has been decomposed into
indivisible subgraphs in this way, the algorithm ends.
 An alternate method for community detection is a technique that bears a
striking resemblance to the Kernighan-Lin algorithm. Suppose we are given
some initial division of our vertices into two groups. We then find among
the vertices the one that, when moved to the other group, will give the
biggest increase in the modularity of the complete network, or the smallest
decrease if no increase is possible. We make such moves repeatedly, with
the constraint that each vertex is moved only once. When all the vertices
have been moved, we search the set of intermediate states occupied by the
network during the operation of the algorithm to find the state that has the
greatest modularity. Starting again from this state, we repeat the entire
process iteratively until no further improvement in the modularity results.
Although this method by itself only gives reasonable modularity values,
the method really comes into its own when it is used in combination with
the spectral method introduced earlier. The spectral approach based on the
leading eigenvector of the modularity matrix gives an excellent guide to the
general form that the communities should take and this general form can
then be fine-tuned by the vertex moving method to reach the best possible
modularity value. The whole procedure is repeated to subdivide the network
until every remaining subgraph is indivisible, and no further improvement
in the modularity is possible.
The most time-consuming part of the algorithm is the evaluation of the
leading eigenvector of the modularity matrix. The fastest method for
finding this eigenvector is the simple power method, the repeated
multiplication of the matrix into a trial vector. Although it appears at first
glance that matrix multiplications will be slow, taking $$O(n^{2})$$
operations each because the modularity matrix is dense, we can in fact
perform them much faster by exploiting the particular structure of the
matrix. Writing $$B=A-kk^{T}/2|E|$$, where A is the adjacency
matrix and k is the vector whose elements are the degrees of the vertices,
the product of B and an arbitrary vector x can be written
$$\begin{aligned} Bx = Ax - \frac{k(k^{T}\cdot x)}{2|E|} (14.9)
\end{aligned}$$
The first term is a standard sparse matrix multiplication taking time
$$O(|V|+|E|)$$. The inner product $$k^{T}\cdot x$$ takes time
O(|V|) to evaluate and hence the second term can be evaluated in total time
O(|V|) also. Thus the complete multiplication can be performed in
$$O(|V|+|E|)$$ time. Typically O(|V|) such multiplications are needed
to converge to the leading eigenvector, for a running time of
$$O[(|V|+|E|)|V|]$$ overall. Often we are concerned with sparse
graphs with $$|E|\propto |V|$$, in which case the running time
becomes $$O(|V|^{2})$$. It is a simple matter to extend this
procedure to find the leading eigenvector of the generalized modularity
matrix, Eq. 14.8, also.
Although we will not go through the details here, it is straight-forward
to show that the fine-tuning stage of the algorithm can also be completed in
$$O[(|V|+|E|)|V|]$$ time, so that the combined running time for a
single split of a graph or subgraph scales as $$O[(|V|+|E|)|V|]$$, or
$$O(|V|^{2})$$ on a sparse graph.
We then repeat the division into two parts until the network is reduced
to its component indivisible subgraphs. The running time of the entire
process depends on the depth of the tree or “dendrogram” formed by these
repeated divisions. In the worst case the dendrogram has depth linear in |V|,
but only a small fraction of possible dendrograms realize this worst case. A
more realistic figure for running time is given by the average depth of the
dendrogram, which goes as $$\log |V|$$, giving an average running
time for the whole algorithm of $$O(|V|^{2}\log |V|)$$ in the sparse
case. This is considerably better than the $$O(|V|^{3})$$ running
time of the betweenness algorithm, and slightly better than the
$$O(|V|^{2}\log 2|V|)$$ of the extremal optimization algorithm.

14.2.3 Minimum Cut Trees

Reference [1] introduces a simple graph clustering method based on
minimum cuts within the graph.
The idea behind the minimum cut clustering techniques is to create
clusters that have small inter-cluster cuts and relatively large intra-cluster
cuts. The clustering algorithm used in this paper is based on inserting an
artificial sink into a graph that gets connected to all nodes in the network.
For a weighted graph G(V, E), we define a cut in this graph as (A, B)
where A and B are two subsets of V, such that $$A\cup B=V$$ and
$$A\cap B=\phi $$. The sum of the weights of the edges crossing the
cut defines its value. A real function c is used to represent the value of a
cut, i.e, cut(A, B) has value c(A, B). c can also be applied when A and B
don’t cover V, but $$A\cup B\subset V$$.
 For this graph G, there exists a weighted graph $$T_{G}$$, which
is called the minimum cut tree of G. This minimum cut tree has the property
that the minimum cut between two vertices s and t in G can be found by
inspecting the path that connects s and t in $$T_{G}$$. The edge of
minimum capacity on that path corresponds to the minimum cut. The
capacity of the edge is equal to the minimum cut value, and its removal
yields two sets of nodes in $$T_{G}$$, and also in G corresponding
to the two sides of the cut. Reference [3] provides algorithms for computing
minimum cut trees.
Let $$(S,\overline{S})$$ be a cut in G. The expansion of the cut
is defined as
$$\begin{aligned} \psi (S) = \frac{\sum \limits _{u\in S,v\in (14.10)
\overline{S}}w(u,v)}{min\{|S|,|\overline{S}|\}} \end{aligned}$$
where w(u, v) is the weight of the edge (u, v). The expansion of a
(sub)graph is the minimum expansion over all the cuts of the (sub)graph.
The expansion of a clustering of G is the minimum expansion over all its
clusters. The larger the expansion of the clustering, the higher its quality.
The conductance for the cut $$(S,\overline{S})$$ is defined as
$$\begin{aligned} \phi (S) = \frac{\sum \limits _{u\in S,v\in
\overline{S}}w(u,v)}{min\{c(S),c(\overline{S})\}} (14.11)
\end{aligned}$$
where
$$c(S)=c(S,V)=\sum \limits _{u\in S}\sum \limits _{v\in V}w(u,v)$$.
The conductance of a graph is the minimum conductance over all the cuts
of the graph. For a clustering of G, let $$C\subseteq V$$ be a cluster
and $$(S,C-S)$$ a cluster within C, where $$S\subseteq C$$.
The conductance of S in C is
$$\begin{aligned} \phi (S,C) = \frac{\sum \limits _{u\in S,v\in C- (14.12)
S}w(u,v)}{min\{c(S),c(C-S)\}} \end{aligned}$$
The conductance of a cluster $$\phi (C)$$ is the smallest conductance
of a cut within the cluster; for a clustering, the conductance is the minimum
conductance of its clusters.
The main difference between expansion and conductance is that
expansion treats all nodes as equally important while the conductance gives
greater importance to nodes with higher degree and adjacent edge weight.
 However, both expansion and conductance are insufficient by
themselves as clustering criteria because neither enforces qualities
pertaining to inter-cluster weight, nor the relative size of clusters. Moreover,
these are both NP-hard and require approximations.
The paper present a cut clustering algorithm . Let G(V, E) be a graph
and let $$s,t\in V$$ be two nodes of G. Let (S, T) be the minimum cut
between s and t, where $$s\in S$$ and $$t\in T$$. S is defined
to be the community of s in G w.r.t t. If the minimum cut between s and t is
not unique, we choose the minimum cut that maximises the size of S.
The paper provides proofs for the following theorems.
Here, a community S is defined as a collection of nodes that has the
property that all nodes of the community predominantly links to other
community nodes.

Theorem 34
For an undirected graph G(V, E), let S be a community of s w.r.t t.
Then
$$\begin{aligned} \sum \limits _{v\in S}w(u,v) > \sum
\limits _{v\in \overline{S}}w(u,v),\forall u\in S-\{s\} (14.13)
\end{aligned}$$

Theorem 35 Let G(V, E) be a graph and $$k>1$$ an

integer. The problem of partitioning G into k communities is NP-
complete.
When no t is given, an artificial node t called the artificial sink is
introduced. The artificial sink is connected to all nodes of G via an
undirected edge of capacity $$\alpha $$.

Theorem 36
Let G(V, E) be an undirected graph, $$s\in V$$ a source, and
connect an artificial sink t with edges of capacity $$\alpha $$ to all
nodes. Let S be the community of s w.r.t t. For any non-empty P and Q,
such that $$P\cup Q=S$$ and $$P\cap Q=\phi $$, the
following bounds always hold:
$$\begin{aligned} \frac{c(S,V-S)}{|V-S|}\le \alpha \le (14.14)
\frac{c(P,Q)}{min(|P|,|Q|)} \end{aligned}$$
 Theorem 37 Let $$s,t\in V$$ be two nodes of G and let S be
the community of s w.r.t t. Then, there exists a minimum cut tree
$$T_{G}$$ of G, and an edge $$(a,b)\in T_{G}$$, such that
the removal of (a, b) yields S and $$V-S$$.

Theorem 38
Let $$T_{G}$$ be a minimum cut tree of a graph G(V, E), and
let (u, w) be an edge of $$T_{G}$$. Edge (u, w) yields the cut
(U, W) in G, with $$u\in U$$, $$w\in W$$. Now, take any
cut $$(U_{1},U_{2})$$ of U, so that $$U_{1}$$ and
$$U_{2}$$ are non-empty, $$u\in U_{1}$$,
$$U_{1}\cup U_{2}=U$$, and $$U_{1}\cap U_{2}=\phi $$.
Then,
$$\begin{aligned} c(W,U_{2})\le c(U_{1},U_{2}) (14.15)
\end{aligned}$$

Theorem 39
Let $$G_{\alpha }$$ be the expanded graph of G, and let S be
the community of s w.r.t the artificial sink t. For any non-empty P and Q,
such that $$P\cup Q=S$$ and $$P\cap Q=\phi $$, the
following bound always holds:
$$\begin{aligned} \alpha \le \frac{c(P,Q)}{min(|P|,|Q|)} (14.16)
\end{aligned}$$

Theorem 40
Let $$G_{\alpha }$$ be the expanded graph of G(V, E) and let
S be the community of s w.r.t the artificial sink t. Then, the following
bound always holds:
$$\begin{aligned} \frac{c(S,V-S)}{|V-S|}\le \alpha (14.17)
\end{aligned}$$
The cut clustering algorithm is as given in Algorithm 8

../images/462433_1_En_14_Chapter/462433_1_En_14_Figa_HTML.gif

Theorem 41 For a source s in $$G_{\alpha _{i}}$$, where

$$\alpha _{i}\in \{\alpha _{1},\ldots ,\alpha _{max}\}$$, such that
 $$\alpha _{1}<\alpha _{2}<\cdots <\alpha _{max}$$, the
communities $$S_{1},\ldots ,S_{max}$$ are such that
$$S_{1}\subseteq S_{2} \subseteq \cdots \subseteq S_{max}$$,
where $$S_{i}$$ is the community of s w.r.t t in
$$G_{\alpha _{i}}$$.

Theorem 42 Let $$v_{1},v_{2}\in V$$ and

$$S_{1},S_{2}$$ be their communities w.r.t t in
$$G_{\alpha }$$. Then either $$S_{1}$$ and
$$S_{2}$$ are disjoint or the one is a subset of the other.

Theorem 43 Let
$$\alpha _{1}>\alpha _{2}>\cdots >\alpha _{max}$$ be a
sequence of parameter values that connect t to V in
$$G_{\alpha _{i}}$$. Let
$$\alpha _{max+1}\le \alpha _{max}$$ be small enough to yield a
single cluster in G and $$\alpha _{0}\ge \alpha _{1}$$ be large
enough to yield all singletons. Then all $$\alpha _{i+1}$$ values,
for $$0\le i\le max$$, yield clusters in G which are supersets of the
clusters produced by each $$\alpha _{i}$$, and all clusterings
together form a hierarchical tree over the clusterings of G.

14.3 Tie Strengths in Mobile Communication

Network
Reference [6] examined the communication patterns of millions of mobile
phone users and found that social networks are robust to the removal of the
strong ties but fall apart after a phase transition if the weak ties are
removed.
A significant portion of a country’s communication network was
reconstructed from 18 weeks of all mobile phone call records among
$${\approx } 20\%$$ of the country’s entire population,
$$90\%$$ of whose inhabitants had a mobile phone subscription. To
translate this phone log data into a network representation that captures the
characteristics of the underlying communication network, the two users
were connected with an undirected link if there had been at least one
reciprocated pair of phone calls between them and the strength,
 $$w_{AB} = w_{BA}$$, of a tie is defined as the aggregated
duration of calls between users A and B. The resulting mobile call graph
(MCG) contains 4.6 million nodes and 7 million links, $$84.1\%$$ of
which belonged to a giant component.
Figure 14.5a shows that the MCG has a skewed degree distribution with
a long tail, indicating that although most users communicate with only a
few individuals, a small minority talks with dozens. If the tail is
approximated by a power law, which appears to fit the data better than an
exponential distribution, the obtained exponent
$$\gamma _{k}=8.4$$. Figure 14.5b indicates that the tie strength
distribution is broad but decaying with exponent
$$\gamma _{w}=1.9$$, so that although the majority of ties
correspond to a few minutes of airtime, a small fraction of users spend
hours chatting with each other. Figure 14.5c measures the relative
topological overlap of the neighbourhood of two users $$v_{i}$$ and
$$v_{j}$$, representing the proportion of their common friends
$$O_{ij} = n_{ij}/((k_{i}-1)+(k_{j}-1)-n_{ij})$$, where
$$n_{ij}$$ is the number of common neighbours of $$v_{i}$$
and $$v_{j}$$, and $$k_{i}(k_{j})$$ denotes the degree of
node $$v_{i}(v_{j})$$. If $$v_{i}$$ and $$v_{j}$$ have
no common acquaintances, then we have $$O_{ij}=0$$, the link
between i and j representing potential bridges between two different
communities. If i and j are part of the same circle of friends, then
$$O_{ij}=1$$. Figure 14.5d shows that permuting randomly the tie
strengths between links results in $$O_{ij}$$ that is independent of
$$w_{ij}$$.

../images/462433_1_En_14_Chapter/462433_1_En_14_Fig5_HTML.gif
Fig. 14.5 a Degree distribution. b Tie strength distribution. The blue line in a and b correspond to
$$P(x) = a(x+x_{0})^{-x}exp(-x/x_{c})$$ , where x corresponds to either k or w. The parameter
values for the fits in (A) are $$k_{0}=10.9$$ , $$\gamma _{k}=8.4$$ , $$k_{c}=\infty $$ ,
and for the fits in (B) are $$w_{0}=280, \gamma _{w}=1.9, w_{c}=3.45\times 10.5$$ . c
Illustration of the overlap between two nodes, $$v_{i}$$ and $$v_{j}$$ , its value being
shown for four local network configurations. d In the real network, the overlap
$$<O>_{w}$$ (blue circles) increases as a function of cumulative tie strength
$$P_{cum}(w)$$ , representing the fraction of links with tie strength smaller than w. The dyadic
hypothesis is tested by randomly permuting the weights, which removes the coupling between
 $$<O>_{w}$$ and w (red squares). The overlap $$<O>_{b}$$ decreases as a
function of cumulative link betweenness centrality b (black diamonds)

Figure 14.6a depicts the network in the vicinity of a randomly selected

individual, where the link colour corresponds to the strength of each tie. We
observe from the figure that the network consists of clusters, typically
grouped around a high degree individual. The majority of strong ties are
found within the clusters, indicating that users spend most of their on-air
time talking to members of their immediate circle of friends. On the
contrary, most links connecting different communities are visibly weaker
than the links within communities. Figure 14.6b shows that when the link
strengths among the connected user pairs are randomly permuted, more
weak ties are found to connect vertices within communities and more strong
ties connect distant communities. Figure 14.6c shows what it would look
like if, inter-community ties were strong and intra-community ties were
weak.

../images/462433_1_En_14_Chapter/462433_1_En_14_Fig6_HTML.gif
Fig. 14.6 Each link represents mutual calls between the two users, and all nodes are shown that are
at distance less than six from the selected user, marked by a circle in the center. a The real tie
strengths, observed in the call logs, defined as the aggregate call duration in minutes. b The dyadic
hypothesis suggests that the tie strength depends only on the relationship between the two
individuals. To illustrate the tie strength distribution in this case, we randomly permuted tie strengths
for the sample in a. c The weight of the links assigned on the basis of their betweenness centrality
$$b_{ij}$$ values for the sample in A as suggested by the global efficiency principle. In this case,
the links connecting communities have high $$b_{ij}$$ values (red), whereas the links within the
communities have low $$b_{ij}$$ values (green)

Figures 14.5 and 14.6 suggest that instead of tie strength being
determined by the characteristics of the individuals it connects or by the
network topology, it is determined solely by the network structure in the
tie’s immediate vicinity.
To evaluate this suggestion, we explore the network’s ability to
withstand the removal of either strong or weak ties. For this, we measure
the relative size of the giant component $$R_{gc}(f)$$, providing the
fraction of nodes that can all reach each other through connected paths as a
function of the fraction of removed links, f. Figure 14.7a, b shows that
removing in rank order the weakest (or smallest overlap) to strongest (or
greatest overlap) ties leads to the network’s sudden disintegration at
 $$f^{w}=0.8(f^{O}=0.6)$$. However, removing first the strongest
ties will shrink the network but will not rapidly break it apart. The precise
point at which the network disintegrates can be determined by monitoring
$$\tilde{S}=\sum _{s<s_{max}}n_{s}s^{2}/N$$, where
$$n_{s}$$ is the number of clusters containing s nodes. Figure 14.7c,
d shows that $$\tilde{S}$$ develops a peak if we start with the
weakest links. Finite size scaling, a well established technique for
identifying the phase transition, indicates that the values of the critical
points are $$f^{O}_{c}(\infty )=0.62\pm 0.05$$ and
$$f^{w}_{c}(\infty )=0.80\pm 0.04$$ for the removal of the weak
ties, but there is no phase transition when the strong ties are removed first.

../images/462433_1_En_14_Chapter/462433_1_En_14_Fig7_HTML.gif
Fig. 14.7 The control parameter f denotes the fraction of removed links. a and c These graphs
correspond to the case in which the links are removed on the basis of their strengths ( $$w_{ij}$$
removal). b and d These graphs correspond to the case in which the links were removed on the basis
of their overlap ( $$O_{ij}$$ removal). The black curves correspond to removing first the high-
strength (or high $$O_{ij}$$ ) links, moving toward the weaker ones, whereas the red curves
represent the opposite, starting with the low-strength (or low $$O_{ij}$$ ) ties and moving toward
the stronger ones. a and b The relative size of the largest component
$$R_{GC}(f)=N_{GC}(f)/N_{GC}(f=0)$$ indicates that the removal of the low $$w_{ij}$$
or $$O_{ij}$$ links leads to a breakdown of the network, whereas the removal of the high
$$w_{ij}$$ or $$O_{ij}$$ links leads only to the network’s gradual shrinkage. a Inset Shown
is the blowup of the high $$w_{ij}$$ region, indicating that when the low $$w_{ij}$$ ties are
removed first, the red curve goes to zero at a finite f value. c and d According to percolation theory,
$$\tilde{S}=\sum _{s<s_{max}}n_{s}s^{2}/N$$ diverges for $$N\rightarrow \infty $$ as
we approach the critical threshold $$f_{c}$$ , where the network falls apart. If we start link
removal from links with low $$w_{ij}$$ (c) or $$O_{ij}$$ (d) values, we observe a clear
signature of divergence. In contrast, if we start with high $$w_{ij}$$ (c) or $$O_{ij}$$ (d)
links, there the divergence is absent

This finding gives us the following conclusion: Given that the strong
ties are predominantly within the communities, their removal will only
locally disintegrate a community but not affect the network’s overall
integrity. In contrast, the removal of the weak links will delete the bridges
that connect different communities, leading to a phase transition driven
network collapse.
To see whether this observation affects global information diffusion, at
time 0 a randomly selected individual is infected with some novel
information. It is assumed that at each time step, each infected individual,
$$v_{i}$$, can pass the information to his/her contact,
$$v_{j}$$, with effective probability $$P_{ij}=xw_{ij}$$,
where the parameter x controls the overall spreading rate. Therefore, the
more time two individuals spend on the phone, the higher the chance that
they will pass on the monitored information. The spreading mechanism is
similar to the susceptible-infected model of epidemiology in which
recovery is not possible, i.e., an infected individual will continue
transmitting information indefinitely. As a control, the authors considered
spreading on the same network, but replaced all tie strengths with their
average value, resulting in a constant transmission probability for all links.
Figure 14.8a shows the real diffusion simulation, where it was found
that information transfer is significantly faster on the network for which all
weights are equal, the difference being rooted in a dynamic trapping of
information in communities. Such trapping is clearly visible if the number
of infected individuals in the early stages of the diffusion process is
monitored (as shown in Fig. 14.8b). Indeed, rapid diffusion within a single
community was observed, corresponding to fast increases in the number of
infected users, followed by plateaus, corresponding to time intervals during
which no new nodes are infected before the news escapes the community.
When all link weights are replaced with an average value w (the control
diffusion simulation) the bridges between communities are strengthened,
and the spreading becomes a predominantly global process, rapidly
reaching all nodes through a hierarchy of hubs.
The dramatic difference between the real and the control spreading
process begs the following question: Where do individuals get their
information? Figure 14.8c shows that the distribution of the tie strengths
through which each individual was first infected has a prominent peak at
$$w \approx 10^{2}$$ s, indicating that, in the vast majority of cases,
an individual learns about the news through ties of intermediate strength.
The distribution changes dramatically in the control case, however, when all
tie strengths are taken to be equal during the spreading process. In this case,
the majority of infections take place along the ties that are otherwise weak
(as depicted in Fig. 14.8d). Therefore, both weak and strong ties have a
relatively insignificant role as conduits for information, the former because
the small amount of on-air time offers little chance of information transfer
and the latter because they are mostly confined within communities, with
little access to new information.
To illustrate the difference between the real and the control simulation,
Fig. 14.8e, f show the spread of information in a small neighbourhood.
First, the overall direction of information flow is systematically different in
the two cases, as indicated by the large shaded arrows. In the control runs,
the information mainly follows the shortest paths. When the weights are
taken into account, however, information flows along a strong tie backbone,
and large regions of the network, connected to the rest of the network by
weak ties, are only rarely infected.

../images/462433_1_En_14_Chapter/462433_1_En_14_Fig8_HTML.gif
Fig. 14.8 The dynamics of spreading on the weighted mobile call graph, assuming that the
probability for a node $$v_{i}$$ to pass on the information to its neighbour $$v_{j}$$ in one
time step is given by $$P_{ij}=xw_{ij}$$ , with $$x=2.59\times 10^{-4}$$ . a The fraction of
infected nodes as a function of time t. The blue curve (circles) corresponds to spreading on the
network with the real tie strengths, whereas the black curve (asterisks) represents the control
simulation, in which all tie strengths are considered equal. b Number of infected nodes as a function
of time for a single realization of the spreading process. Each steep part of the curve corresponds to
invading a small community. The flatter part indicates that the spreading becomes trapped within the
community. c and d Distribution of strengths of the links responsible for the first infection for a node
in the real network (c) and control simulation (d). e and f Spreading in a small neighbourhood in the
simulation using the real weights (E) or the control case, in which all weights are taken to be equal
(f). The infection in all cases was released from the node marked in red, and the empirically observed
tie strength is shown as the thickness of the arrows (right-hand scale). The simulation was repeated
1,000 times; the size of the arrowheads is proportional to the number of times that information was
passed in the given direction, and the colour indicates the total number of transmissions on that link
(the numbers in the colour scale refer to percentages of 1, 000). The contours are guides to the eye,
illustrating the difference in the information direction flow in the two simulations

Problems
The betweenness centrality of an edge $$(u,v)\in E$$ in G(V, E) is given
by Eq. 14.18.
$$\begin{aligned} B(u,v) = \sum \limits _{(s,t)\in (14.18)
V^{2}}\frac{\sigma _{st}(u,v)}{\sigma _{st}} \end{aligned}$$
where $$\sigma _{st}$$ is the number of shortest paths between s and t,
and $$\sigma _{st}(u,v)$$ is the number of shortest paths between s and t
that contain the edge (u, v). This is assuming that the graph G is connected.
The betweenness centrality can be computed in the following manners.
14.4 Exact Betweenness Centrality
For each vertex $$s\in V$$, perform a BFS from s, which gives the BFS
tree $$T_{s}$$. For each $$v\in V$$, let v’s parent set $$P_{s}(v)$$
be defined as the set of nodes $$u\in V$$ that immediately precede v on
some shortest path from s to v in G. During the BFS, compute, for every
$$v\in V$$, the number $$\sigma _{sv}$$ of shortest paths between s
and v, according to recurrence
$$\begin{aligned} \sigma _{sv} = {\left\{ \begin{array}{ll} 1
&{} { if} v = s \\ \sum \limits _{u\in P_{s}(v)}\sigma _{su} (14.19)
&{} { otherwise} \end{array}\right. } \end{aligned}$$
After the BFS is finished, compute the dependency of s on each edge
$$(u,v)\in E$$ using the recurrence
$$\begin{aligned} \delta _{s}(u,v) = {\left\{ \begin{array}{ll}
\frac{\sigma _{su}}{\sigma _{sv}} &{} \text {if}\, v \text { is
a leaf of } T_{s} \\ \frac{\sigma _{su}}{\sigma _{sv}}(1 + \sum (14.20)
\limits _{x:w\in P_{s}(x)}\delta _{s}(w,x)) &{} { otherwise}
\end{array}\right. } \end{aligned}$$
Since the $$\delta $$ values are only really defined for edges that connect
two nodes, u and v, where u is further away from s than v, assume that
$$\delta $$ is 0 for cases that are undefined (i.e., where an edge connects
two nodes that are equidistant from s).
Do not iterate over all edges when computing the dependency values. It
makes more sense to just look at edges that are in some BFS tree starting
from s, since other edges will have zero dependency values (they are not on
any shortest paths). (Though iterating over all edges is not technically
wrong if you just set the dependency values to 0 when the nodes are
equidistant from s.)
The betweenness centrality of (u, v) or B(u, v) is
$$\begin{aligned} B(u,v) = \sum \limits _{s\in V}\delta _{s}(u,v) (14.21)
\end{aligned}$$
This algorithm has a time complexity of O(|V||E|). However, the algorithm
requires the computation of the betweenness centrality of all edges even if
only the values in some edges are to required to be computed.
14.5 Approximate Betweenness Centrality
This is an approximation of the previous algorithm with the difference that
it does not start a BFS from every node but rather samples starting nodes
randomly with replacement. Also, it can approximate betweenness for any
edge $$e \in E$$ without necessarily having to compute the centrality of
all other edges as well.
Repeatedly sample a vertex $$v_{i} \in V$$ and perform a BFS
from $$v_{i}$$ and maintain a running sum $$\Delta _{e}$$ of
the dependency scores $$\delta _{v_{i}}(e)$$ (one
$$\Delta _{e}$$ for each edge e of interest). Sample until
$$\Delta _{e}$$ is greater than cn for some constant
$$c \ge 2$$. Let the total number of samples be k. The estimated
betweenness centrality score of e is given by
$$\frac{n}{k}\Delta _{e}$$.
In this exercise, do the following:

66 Generate a preferential attachment model on 1000 nodes and degree of

4.

67 Implement the exact betweenness centrality algorithm and compute the

values for all edges $$e \in E$$.

68 Implement the approximate betweenness centrality algorithm and

compute the values for all edges $$e \in E$$. Use $$c = 5$$ and sample
at most $$\frac{|V|}{10}$$ random starting nodes $$v_{i}$$.

69 Each algorithm induces an ordering over edges with respect to

betweenness centrality. Plot one curve for the exact betweenness centrality
algorithm and one for the approximate betweenness centrality algorithm,
overlaid in the same plot. If the edge with the xth largest betweenness
centrality (according to the respective algorithm) has betweenness centrality
y, draw a dot with co-ordinates (x, y). Use a logarithmic y-axis.

References
1. Flake, Gary William, Robert E. Tarjan, and Kostas Tsioutsiouliklis. 2002. Clustering methods
 based on minimum-cut trees. Technical report, technical report 2002–06, NEC, Princeton, NJ.

2. Girvan, Michelle, and Mark E.J. Newman. 2002. Community structure in social and biological
networks. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 99 (12): 7821–7826.
[MathSciNet][Crossref]

3. Gomory, Ralph E., and Tien Chung Hu. 1961. Multi-terminal network flows. Journal of the
Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics 9 (4): 551–570.

4. Granovetter, Mark S. 1977. The strength of weak ties. In Social networks, 347–367. Elsevier.

5. Newman, Mark E.J. 2011. Scientific collaboration networks. II. Shortest paths, weighted
networks, and centrality. Physical Review E 64 (1): 016132.

6. Onnela, J.-P., Jari Saramäki, Jorkki Hyvönen, György Szabó, David Lazer, Kimmo Kaski, János
Kertész, and A.-L. Barabási. 2007. Structure and tie strengths in mobile communication networks.
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 104 (18): 7332–7336.
© Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2018
Krishna Raj P.M., Ankith Mohan and K.G. Srinivasa, Practical Social Network Analysis with Python,
Computer Communications and Networks
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-96746-2_15

15. Representation Learning on Graphs

Krishna Raj P. M.1 , Ankith Mohan1 and K. G. Srinivasa2

(1) Department of ISE, Ramaiah Institute of Technology, Bangalore,

Karnataka, India
(2) Department of Information Technology, C.B.P. Government
Engineering College, Jaffarpur, Delhi, India

Krishna Raj P. M.
Email: krishnarajpm@gmail.com

Machine learning on social network applications is now ubiquitous with

tasks ranging from recommendation networks to spam detection. These
applications have traditionally relied on hand-engineered heuristics to
extract features from the graph to exploit machine learning models.
However, recent developments in the field of deep learning have led to
advancements in representation learning which automatically encode the
graph structure into low-dimensional embeddings.
Reference [15] provides a brief review of the representation learning
techniques that can embed individual nodes as well as subgraphs.
The major problem of applying traditional machine learning techniques
to graphs is finding a way to incorporate the information about the structure
of the graph into the machine learning model. For instance, in the case of
link prediction in a social network, one has to first encode the pairwise
properties between nodes such as the strength of relationships or number of
common friends. However, there is no straightforward approach to encode
this information into a feature vector. This means that to extract these
vectors, the vectors depend on hand-engineered features which are
inflexible because they cannot adapt during the learning process, and can be
time-consuming and expensive to design.
This is where representation learning approaches are an advantage.
They seek to learn representations that encode structural information about
the graph by learning a mapping that embeds nodes, or entire subgraphs, as
points in a low-dimensional vector space, $$\mathbb {R}^{d}$$. The
goal is to optimize this mapping so that geometric relationships in this
learned space reflect the structure of the original graph. After optimizing
the embedding space, the learned embeddings can be used as feature inputs
for machine learning tasks. The key distinction between these
representation learning approaches and hand-engineering tasks is how they
deal with the problem of capturing structural information about the graph.
Hand-engineering techniques deal with this problem as a pre-processing
step, while representation learning approaches treat it as a machine learning
task in itself, using a data-driven approach to learn embeddings that encode
graph structure.
We assume that the representation learning algorithm takes as input an
undirected graph $$G=(V,E)$$, its corresponding binary adjacency
matrix A and a real-valued matrix of node attributes
$$X \in \mathbb {R}^{m \times |V|}$$. The goal is to use this
information contained in A and X to map each node, or subgraph, to a
vector $$z \in \mathbb {R}^{d}$$, where $$d<<|V|$$.
There are two perspectives to consider before deciding how to optimize
this mapping. First is the purview of unsupervised learning where only the
information in A and X are considered without accounting for the
downstream machine learning task. Second is the arena of supervised
learning where the embeddings are considered as regression and
classification tasks.

15.1 Node Embedding

In node embedding, the goal is to encode nodes as low-dimensional vectors
that summarize their graph position and the structure of their local graph
neighbourhood. These low-dimensional embeddings can be viewed as
encoding, or projections of nodes into a latent space, where geometric
relations in this latent space correspond to connections in the original graph.
 First, we will look at the encoder-decoder framework which consists of
two main mapping functions: an encoder , which maps each node to a low-
dimensional vector or embedding, and a decoder , which decodes structural
information about the graph from these learned embeddings. The idea
behind this framework is that if we can learn to decode high-dimensional
graph information from the encoded low-dimensional embeddings, then
these embeddings should be sufficient for the downstream machine learning
tasks.
Formally, the encoder is a function
$$\begin{aligned} ENC: V \rightarrow \mathbb {R}^{d} (15.1)
\end{aligned}$$
that maps nodes to vector embeddings,
$$z_{i} \in \mathbb {R}^{d}$$ (where $$z_{i}$$ corresponds
to the embedding vector for the node $$v_{i} \in V$$).
A decoder must accept a set of node embeddings as input and decode
user-specified graph statistics from these embeddings. Although there are
several ways to accomplish this task, one of the most commonly used is a
basic pairwise decoder
$$\begin{aligned} DEC: \mathbb {R}^{d} \times \mathbb (15.2)
{R}^{d} \rightarrow \mathbb {R}^{+} \end{aligned}$$
that maps pairs of node embeddings to a real-valued graph proximity
measure, which quantifies the proximity of the two nodes in the original
graph.
When we apply the pairwise decoder to a pair of embeddings (
$$z_{i}$$, $$z_{j}$$) we get a reconstruction of the proximity
between $$v_{i}$$ and $$v_{j}$$ in the original graph, and the
goal is to optimize the encoder and decoder mappings to minimize the error,
or loss, in this reconstruction so that:
$$\begin{aligned} DEC(ENC(v_{i}),ENC(v_{j})) = (15.3)
DEC(z_{i},z_{j}) \approx s_{G}(v_{i},v_{j}) \end{aligned}$$
where $$s_{G}$$ is a user-defined, graph-based proximity measure
between nodes, defined over G.
Most approaches realize the reconstruction objective (Eq. 15.3) by
minimizing an empirical loss, $$\mathcal {L}$$, over a set of training
node pairs, $$\mathcal {D}$$
(15.4)
 $$\begin{aligned} \mathcal {L} = \sum \limits _{(v_{i},v_{j})\in
\mathcal {D}}l(DEC(z_{i},z_{j}),s_{G}(v_{i},v_{j})).
\end{aligned}$$
where
$$l: \mathbb {R} \times \mathbb {R} \rightarrow \mathbb {R}$$ is a
user-specified loss function, which measures the discrepancy between the
decoded proximity values, $$DEC(z_{i},z_{j})$$, and the true
values, $$s_{G}(v_{i},v_{j})$$.
Once the encoder-decoder system has been optimised, we can use the
trained encoder to generate embeddings for nodes, which can then be used
as a feature inputs for downstream machine learning tasks.

15.1.1 Direct Encoding

In this direct encoding approach, the encoder function is simply an
embedding lookup:
$$\begin{aligned} ENC(v_{i}) = Zv_{i} \end{aligned}$$ (15.5)
where $$Z \in \mathbb {R}^{d \times |V|}$$ is a matrix containing the
embedding vectors for all nodes and $$v_{i} \in \mathbb {I}_{V}$$ is a
one-hot indicator vector indicating the column of Z corresponding to node
$$v_{i}$$. The set of trainable parameters for direct encoding methods is
simply $$\Theta _{ENC} = \{Z\}$$, i.e. the embedding matrix Z is
optimized directly.

15.1.2 Factorization-Based Approaches

Early methods for learning representations for nodes largely focused on
matrix-factorization approaches, which are directly inspired by classic
techniques for dimensionality reduction.

15.1.2.1 Laplacian Eigenmaps

This technique can be viewed as a direct encoding approach in which the
decoder is defined as
$$\begin{aligned} DEC(z_{i},z_{j}) = ||z_{i} - z_{j}||_{2}^{2} (15.6)
\end{aligned}$$
and the loss function weights pairs of nodes according to their proximity in
the graph
(15.7)
 $$\begin{aligned} \mathcal {L} = \sum \limits _{(v_{i},v_{j}) \in
\mathcal {D}}DEC(z_{i},z_{j}) \cdot s_{G}(v_{i},v_{j})
\end{aligned}$$

15.1.2.2 Inner-Product Methods

There are a large number of embedding methodologies based on a pairwise,
inner-product decoder
$$\begin{aligned} DEC(z_{i},z_{j}) = z_{i}^{T}z_{j} (15.8)
\end{aligned}$$
where the strength of the relationship between two nodes is proportional to
the dot product of their embeddings. This decoder is commonly paired with
the mean-squared-error (MSE) loss
$$\begin{aligned} \mathcal {L} = \sum \limits _{(v_{i},v_{j}) \in
\mathcal {D}}||DEC(z_{i},z_{j})-s_{G}(v_{i},v_{j})||^{2}_{2} (15.9)
\end{aligned}$$
Graph Factorization (GF) algorithm [1], GraRep [4], and HOPE [22] fall
under this category. These algorithms share the same decoder function as
well as the loss function, but differ in the proximity measure. The GF
algorithm defines proximity measure directly based on the adjacency
matrix, i.e, $$s_{G}(v_{i},v_{j}) \triangleq A_{i,j}$$. GraRep uses
higher-order adjacency matrix as a definition of the proximity measure,
(e.g., $$s_{G}(v_{i},v_{j}) \triangleq A_{i,j}^{2}$$. The HOPE
algorithm supports general proximity measures.
These methods are generally referred to as matrix-factorization
approaches because, averaging across all nodes, they optimize loss function
of the form:
$$\begin{aligned} \mathcal {L} = ||Z^{T}Z - S||_{2}^{2} (15.10)
\end{aligned}$$
where S is a matrix containing pairwise proximity measures (i.e.,
$$S_{i,j} \triangleq s_{G}(v_{i},v_{j})$$) and Z is the matrix of
node embeddings. Intuitively, the goal of these methods is simply to learn
embeddings for each node such that the inner product between the learned
embedding vectors approximates some deterministic measure of graph
proximity.

15.1.3 Random Walk Approaches

In this method, the node embeddings are learnt from random walks
statistics. The idea is to optimize the node embeddings so that nodes have
similar embeddings if they tend to co-occur on short random walks over the
graph. Thus, instead of using a deterministic measure of graph proximity,
these random walk methods employ a flexible, stochastic measure of graph
proximity.

15.1.3.1 DeepWalk and node2vec

DeepWalk [23] and node2vec [13] rely on direct encoding and use a
decoder based on the inner product. However, instead of trying to decode a
fixed deterministic distance measure, these approaches optimize
embeddings to encode the statistics of random walks. The idea behind these
approaches is to learn embeddings so that:
$$\begin{aligned} DEC(z_{i},z_{j}) \triangleq
\frac{e^{z_{i}^{T}z_{j}}}{\sum \limits _{v_{k}\in (15.11)
V}e^{z_{i}^{T}z_{k}}} \\ \approx p_{G,T}(v_{j}|v_{i})
\nonumber \end{aligned}$$
where $$p_{G,T}(v_{j}|v_{i})$$ is the probability of visiting
$$v_{j}$$ on a length-T random walk starting at $$v_{i}$$, with T
usually defined to be in the range $$T \in \{2, \dots , 10\}$$.
$$p_{G,T}(v_{j}|v_{i})$$ is both stochastic and symmetric.
More formally, these approaches attempt to minimize the following
cross-entropy loss:
$$\begin{aligned} \mathcal {L} = \sum \limits _{(v_{i},v_{j}) \in (15.12)
\mathcal {D}}-log(DEC(z_{i},z_{j})) \end{aligned}$$
where in this case the training set, $$\mathcal {D}$$, is generated by
sampling random walks starting from each node (i.e., where N pairs for
each node, $$v_{i}$$, are sampled from the distribution
$$(v_{i},v_{j}) \sim p_{G,T}(v_{j}|v_{j})$$). However, naively
evaluating this loss is of order O(|D||V|) since evaluating the denominator of
Eq. 15.11 has time complexity O(|V|). Thus, DeepWalk and node2vec use
different optimizations and approximations to compute the loss in
Eq. 15.12. DeepWalk employs a “hierarchical softmax” technique to
compute the normalizing factor, using a binary-tree structure to accelerate
the computation. In contrast, node2vec approximates Eq. 15.12 using
“negative sampling” : instead of normalizing over the full vertex set,
node2vec approximates the normalizing factor using a set of random
“negative samples”.
The key distinction between node2vec and DeepWalk is that node2vec
allows for a flexible definition of random walks, whereas DeepWalk uses
simple unbiased random walks over the graph. In particular, node2vec
introduces two random walk hyper-parameters, p and q, that bias the
random walk. The hyper-parameter p controls the likelihood of the walk
immediately revisiting a node, while q controls the likelihood of the walk
revisiting a node’s one-hop neighbourhood. By introducing these hyper-
parameters, node2vec is able to smoothly interpolate between walks that are
more akin to breadth-first or depth-first search. Reference [13] found that
tuning these parameters allowed the model to trade-off between learning
embeddings that emphasize community structures or embeddings that
emphasize local structural roles.
Figure 15.1 depicts the DeepWalk algorithm applied to the Zachary
Karate Club network to generate its two-dimensional embedding. The
distance between nodes in this embedding space reflects proximity in the
original graph.

../images/462433_1_En_15_Chapter/462433_1_En_15_Fig1_HTML.gif
Fig. 15.1 a Graph of the Zachary Karate Club network where nodes represent members and edges
indicate friendship between members. b Two-dimensional visualization of node embeddings
generated from this graph using the DeepWalk method. The distances between nodes in the
embedding space reflect proximity in the original graph, and the node embeddings are spatially
clustered according to the different colour-coded communities

Figure 15.2 illustrates the node2vec algorithm applied to the graph of

the characters of the Les Misérables novel where colour depict the nodes
which have structural equivalence.

../images/462433_1_En_15_Chapter/462433_1_En_15_Fig2_HTML.gif
Fig. 15.2 Graph of the Les Misérables novel where nodes represent characters and edges indicate
interaction at some point in the novel between corresponding characters. (Left) Global positioning of
the nodes. Same colour indicates that the nodes belong to the same community. (Right) Colour
denotes structural equivalence between nodes, i.e, they play the same roles in their local
neighbourhoods. Blue nodes are the articulation points. This equivalence where generated using the
node2vec algorithm

15.1.3.2 Large-Scale Information Network Embeddings (LINE)

Another highly successful direct encoding approach, which is not based on
random walks but is often compared with DeepWalk and node2vec, is the
LINE method [28]. LINE combines two encoder-decoder objectives that
optimize “first-order” and “second-order” graph proximity, respectively.
The first-order objective uses a decoder based on the sigmoid function,
$$\begin{aligned} DEC(z_{i},z_{j}) = \frac{1}{1+e^{- (15.13)
z_{i}^{T}z_{j}}} \end{aligned}$$
and an adjacency-based proximity measure. The second-order encoder-
decoder objective is similar but considers two-hop adjacency
neighbourhoods and uses an encoder identical to Eq. 15.11. Both the first-
order and second-order objectives are optimized using loss functions
derived from the KL-divergence metric [28]. Thus, LINE is conceptually
related to node2vec and DeepWalk in that it uses a probabilistic decoder
and loss, but it explicitly factorizes first- and second-order proximities,
instead of combining them in fixed-length random walks.

15.1.3.3 Hierarchical Representation Learning for Networks

(HARP)
Reference [7] introduced a “meta-strategy”, called HARP, for improving
various random-walk approaches via a graph pre-processing step. In this
approach, a graph coarsening procedure is used to collapse related nodes in
G together into “supernodes”, and then DeepWalk, node2vec, or LINE is
run on this coarsened graph. After embedding the coarsened version of G,
the learned embedding of each supernode is used as an initial value for the
random walk embeddings of the supernode’s constituent nodes (in another
round of non-convex optimization on a “finer-grained” version of the
graph). This general process can be repeated in a hierarchical manner at
varying levels of coarseness, and has been shown to consistently improve
performance of DeepWalk, node2vec, and LINE.
These direct encoding approaches that we have discussed so far train
unique embedding vectors for each node independently and hence have the
following drawbacks:
1. No parameters are shared between nodes in the encoder. This can be
statistically inefficient, since parameter sharing can act as a powerful
form of regularization, and it is also computationally inefficient, since
 it means that the number of parameters in direct encoding methods
necessarily grows as O(|V|).
2.
Direct encoding also fails to leverage node attributes during encoding.
In many large graphs, nodes have attribute information (e.g., user
profiles) that is often highly informative with respect to the node’s
position and role in the graph.
3.
Direct encoding methods can only generate embeddings for nodes that
were present during the training phase, and they cannot generate
embeddings for previously unseen nodes unless additional rounds of
optimization are performed to optimize the embeddings for these
nodes. This is highly problematic for evolving graphs, massive graphs
that cannot be fully stored in memory, or domains that require
generalizing to new graphs after training.
A number of approaches have been proposed for dealing with the
aforementioned drawbacks.

15.2 Neighbourhood Autoencoder Methods

Deep Neural Graph Representations (DNGR) [5] and Structural Deep
Network Embeddings (SDNE) [30] address the first problem. Unlike the
direct encoding methods, they directly incorporate graph structure into the
encoder algorithm. These approaches use autoencoders [16] to compress
information about a node’s local neighbourhood. Additionally, the
approaches use a unary decoder instead of a pairwise one.
In these approaches, each node, $$v_{i}$$, is associated with a
neighbourhood vector, $$s_{i} \in \mathbb {R}^{|V|}$$, which
corresponds to $$v_{i}$$’s row in the matrix S. The $$s_{i}$$
vector contains $$v_{i}$$’s pairwise graph proximity with all other
nodes and functions as a high-dimensional vector representation of
$$v_{i}$$’s neighbourhood. The autoencoder objective for DNGR
and SDNE is to embed nodes using the $$s_{i}$$ vectors such that
the $$s_{i}$$ vectors can then be reconstructed from these
embeddings:
(15.14)
 $$\begin{aligned} DEC(ENC(s_{i})) = DEC(z_{i}) \approx s_{i}
\end{aligned}$$
The loss for these methods takes the following form:
$$\begin{aligned} \mathcal {L} = \sum \limits _{v_{i} \in (15.15)
V}||DEC(z_{i})-s_{i}||_{2}^{2} \end{aligned}$$
As with the pairwise decoder, we have that the dimension of the
$$z_{i}$$ embeddings is much smaller than |V|, so the goal is to
compress the node’s neighbourhood information into a low-dimensional
vector. For both SDNE and DNGR, the encoder and decoder functions
consist of multiple stacked neural network layers: each layer of the encoder
reduces the dimensionality of its input, and each layer of the decoder
increases the dimensionality of its input.
SDNE and DNGR differ in the similarity functions they use to construct
the neighborhood vectors $$s_{i}$$ and also how the autoencoder is
optimized. DNGR defines $$s_{i}$$ according to the pointwise
mutual information of two nodes co-occurring on random walks, similar to
DeepWalk and node2vec. SDNE sets $$s_{i} \triangleq A_{i}$$ and
combines the autoencoder objective with the Laplacian eigenmaps
objective.
However, the autoencoder objective depends on the input
$$s_{i}$$ vector, which contains information about $$v_{i}$$
’s local graph neighbourhood. This dependency allows SDNE and DNGR to
incorporate structural information about a node’s local neighbourhood
directly into the encoder as a form of regularization, which is not possible
for the direct encoding approaches. However, despite this improvement, the
autoencoder approaches still suffer from some serious limitations. Most
prominently, the input dimension to the autoencoder is fixed at |V|, which
can be extremely costly and even intractable for very large graphs. In
addition, the structure and size of the autoencoder is fixed, so SDNE and
DNGR cannot cope with evolving graphs, nor can they generalize across
graphs.

15.3 Neighbourhood Aggregation and

Convolutional Encoders
Another way to deal with the limitations of direct encoding is by designing
encoders that rely on a node’s local neighbourhood instead of the entire
graph. These approaches attempt to generate embeddings by aggregating
information from a node’s local neighbourhood (as shown in Fig. 15.3).

../images/462433_1_En_15_Chapter/462433_1_En_15_Fig3_HTML.gif
Fig. 15.3 Illustration of the neighbourhood aggregation methods. To generate the embedding for a
node, these methods first collect the node’s k-hop neighbourhood. In the next step, these methods
aggregate the attributes of node’s neighbours, using neural network aggregators. This aggregated
neighbourhood information is used to generate an embedding, which is then fed to the decoder

These neighbourhood aggregation algorithms rely on node features or

attributes (denoted $$x_{i} \in \mathbb {R}^{m}$$) to generate
embeddings. The neighbourhood aggregation methods leverage this
attribute information to inform their embeddings. In cases where attribute
data is not given, these methods can use simple graph statistics as attributes
or assign each node a one-hot indicator vector as an attribute. These
methods are often called convolutional because they represent a node as a
function of its surrounding neighbourhood, in a manner similar to the
receptive field of a center-surround convolutional kernel in computer vision
[18].
In the encoding phase, the neighbourhood aggregation methods build up
the representation for a node in an iterative, or recursive fashion. First, the
node embeddings are initialized to be equal to the input node attributes.
Then at each iteration of the encoder algorithm, nodes aggregate the
embeddings of their neighbours, using an aggregation function that operates
over sets of vectors. After this aggregation, every node is assigned a new
embedding, equal to its aggregated neighbourhood vector combined with its
previous embedding from the last iteration. Finally, this combined
embedding is fed through a dense neural network layer and the process
repeats. As the process iterates, the node embeddings contain information
aggregated from further and further reaches of the graph. However, the
dimensionality of the embeddings remains constrained as the process
iterates, so the encoder is forced to compress all the neighbourhood
information into a low dimensional vector. After K iterations the process
terminates and the final embedding vectors are output as the node
representations.
 Graph convolutional networks (GCN) [18, 19, 27, 29], column networks
[24], and the GraphSAGE algorithm [14] are some of the algorithms that
follow this approach. A set of aggregation functions and a set of weight
matrices $$\{W^{k}, \forall k \in [1, K]\}$$ specify how to aggregate
information from a node’s local neighbourhood and, unlike the direct
encoding approaches, these parameters are shared across nodes. The same
aggregation function and weight matrices are used to generate embeddings
for all nodes, and only the input node attributes and neighbourhood
structure change depending on which node is being embedded. This
parameter sharing increases efficiency, provides regularization, and allows
this approach to be used to generate embeddings for nodes that were not
observed during training.
GraphSAGE, column networks, and the various GCN approaches all
follow this algorithm but differ primarily in how the aggregation and vector
combination are performed. GraphSAGE uses concatenation and permits
general aggregation functions; the authors experiment with using the
element-wise mean, a max-pooling neural network and LSTMs [17] as
aggregators, and they found the the more complex aggregators, especially
the max-pooling neural network, gave significant gains. GCNs and column
networks use a weighted sum and a (weighted) element-wise mean.
Column networks also add an additional “interpolation” term, setting
$$\begin{aligned} h_{v}^{k'} = \alpha h_{v}^{k} + (1-\alpha (15.16)
)h_{v}^{k-1} \end{aligned}$$
where $$\alpha $$ is an interpolation weight computed as a non-linear
function of $$h_{v}^{k-1}$$ and
$$h_{\mathcal {N}(v)}^{k-1}$$. This interpolation term allows the
model to retain local information as the process iterates.
In principle, the GraphSAGE, column network, and GCN encoders can
be combined with any of the previously discussed decoders and loss
functions, and the entire system can be optimized using Stochastic Gradient
Descent.
At a high level, these approaches solve the four main limitations of
direct encoding: they incorporate graph structure into the encoder; they
leverage node attributes; their parameter dimension can be made sub-linear
in |V|; and they can generate embeddings for nodes that were not present
during training.
15.4 Binary Classification
In cases where nodes have an associated binary classification label, the
following approach can be used. It should be noted that this approach can
be easily extended to more complex classification settings.
Assume that we have a binary classification label,
$$y_{i} \in \mathbb {Z}$$, associated with each node. To learn to
map nodes to their labels, we can feed our embedding vectors,
$$z_{i}$$, through a logistic, or sigmoid, function
$$\hat{y_{i}} = \sigma (z_{i}^{T}\theta )$$, where $$\theta $$
is a trainable parameter vector. We can then compute the cross-entropy loss
between these predicted class probabilities and the true labels:
$$\begin{aligned} \mathcal {L} = \sum \limits _{v_{i} \in
V}y_{i}log(\sigma (ENC(v_{i})^{T}\theta )) + (1-y_{i})log(1- (15.17)
\sigma (ENC(v_{i})^{T}\theta )) \end{aligned}$$
The gradient computed according to Eq. 15.17 can then be backpropagated
through the encoder to optimize its parameters. This task-specific
supervision can completely replace the reconstruction loss computed using
the decoder, or it can be included along with the decoder loss.

15.5 Multi-modal Graphs

The previous sections have all focused on simple, undirected graphs.
However many real-world graphs have complex multi-modal, or multi-
layer, structures (e.g., heterogeneous node and edge types). In this section
we will look at strategies that cope with this heterogeneity.

15.5.1 Different Node and Edge Types

When dealing with graphs that contain different types of nodes and edges, a
general strategy is to (i) use different encoders for nodes of different types
[6], and (ii) extend pairwise decoders with type-specific parameters [21,
27]. The standard inner product edge decoder can be replaced with a
bilinear form:
$$\begin{aligned} DEC_{\tau }(z_{i},z_{j}) = z^{T}A_{\tau }z (15.18)
\end{aligned}$$
where $$\tau $$ indexes a particular edge type and $$A_{\tau }$$ is a
learned parameter specific to edges of type $$\tau $$. The matrix,
$$A_{\tau }$$, in Eq. 15.18 can be regularized in various ways, which
can be especially useful when there are a large number of edge types, as in
the case for embedding knowledge graphs. Indeed, the literature on
knowledge-graph completion, where the goal is predict missing relations in
knowledge graphs, contains many related techniques for decoding a large
number of edge types.
Recently, [10] also proposed a strategy for sampling random walks from
heterogeneous graphs, where the random walks are restricted to only
transition between particular types of nodes. This approach allows many of
the methods in Sect. 15.1.3 to be applied on heterogeneous graphs and is
complementary to the idea of including type-specific encoders and
decoders.

15.5.2 Node Embeddings Across Layers

When graphs have multiple “layers” that contain copies of the same nodes,
such as in protein-protein interaction networks derived from different
tissues (e.g., brain or liver tissue), some proteins occur across multiple
tissues. In these cases it can be beneficial to share information across layers,
so that a node’s embedding in one layer can be informed by its embedding
in other layers. Reference [31] offer one solution to this problem, called
OhmNet, that combines node2vec with a regularization penalty that ties the
embeddings across layers. Assuming that we have a node $$v_{i}$$,
which belongs to two distinct layers $$G_{1}$$ and $$G_{2}$$, the
standard embedding loss on this node can be augmented as follows:
$$\begin{aligned} \mathcal {L}(v_{i})' = \mathcal {L}(v_{i}) + (15.19)
\lambda ||z_{i}^{G_{1}}-z_{i}^{G_{2}}|| \end{aligned}$$
where $$\mathcal {L}$$ denotes the usual embedding loss for that node,
$$\lambda $$ denotes the regularization strength, and
$$z_{i}^{G_{1}}$$ and $$z_{i}^{G_{2}}$$ denote $$v_{i}$$’s
embeddings in the two different layers, respectively.
Reference [31] further extend this idea by exploiting hierarchies
between graph layers. For example, in protein-protein interaction graphs
derived from various tissues, some layers correspond to interactions
throughout large regions (e.g., interactions that occur in any brain tissue)
while other interaction graphs are more fine-grained (e.g., only interactions
that occur in the frontal lobe). To exploit this structure, embeddings can be
learned at the various levels of the hierarchy, and the regularization in
Eq. 15.19 can recursively be applied between layers that have a parent-child
relationship in the hierarchy.

15.6 Embedding Structural Roles

In many tasks it is necessary to learn representations that correspond to the
structural roles of the nodes, independent of their global graph positions.
The node2vec approach offers one solution to this problem. It was found
that biasing the random walks allows the model to better capture structural
roles. However, [11, 25] have developed node embedding approaches that
are specifically designed to capture structural roles.
Reference [25] propose struc2vec, which involves generating a a series
of weighted auxiliary graphs $$G_{k}'$$,
$$k = \{1, 2, \dots \}$$ from the original graph G, where the auxiliary
graph $$G_{k}'$$ captures structural similarities between nodes’ k-
hop neighbourhoods. In particular, letting $$R_{k}(v_{i})$$ denote
the ordered sequence of degrees of the nodes that are exactly k-hops away
from $$v_{i}$$, the edge-weights, $$w_{k}(v_{i},v_{j})$$, in
auxiliary graph $$G_{k}'$$ are recursively defined as
$$\begin{aligned} w_{k}(v_{i},v_{j}) = w_{k-1}(v_{i},v_{j}) + (15.20)
d(R_{k}(v_{i}),R_{k}(v_{j})) \end{aligned}$$
where $$w_{0}(v_{i},v_{j}) = 0$$ and
$$d(R_{k}(v_{i}),R_{k}(v_{j}))$$ measures the distance between
the ordered degree sequences $$R_{k}(v_{i})$$ and
$$R_{k}(v_{j})$$. After computing these weighted auxiliary graphs,
struc2vec runs biased random walks over them and uses these walks as
input to the node2vec optimization algorithm.
Reference [11] takes an approach called GraphWave to capture
structural roles. It relies on spectral graph wavelets and heat kernels. Let L
denote the graph Laplacian, i.e, $$L = D - A$$ where D contains node
degrees on the diagonal and A is the adjacency matrix. Also, let U and
$$\lambda _{i}$$, $$i = 1\dots |V|$$ denote the eigenvector
matrix and eigenvalues of L, respectively. Finally, we define a heat kernel,
$$g(\lambda ) = e^{-s\lambda }$$, with pre-defined scale s. Using U
and $$g(\lambda )$$, GraphWave computes a vector,
 $$\psi _{v_{i}}$$, corresponding to the structural role of node,
$$v_{i} \in V$$, as
$$\begin{aligned} \psi _{v_{i}} = UGU^{T}v_{i} (15.21)
\end{aligned}$$
where $$G = diag([g(\lambda _{1}), \dots , g(\lambda _{|V|})])$$
and $$v_{i}$$ is a one-hot indicator vector corresponding to
$$v_{i}$$’s row/column in the Laplacian. The paper shows that these
$$\psi _{v_{i}}$$ vectors implicitly relate to topological quantities,
such as $$v_{i}$$’s degree and the number of k-cycles
$$v_{i}$$ is involved in. With a proper choice of scale, s, the
WaveGraph is able to effectively capture structural information about a
node’s role in a graph.
Node embeddings find applications in visualization, clustering, node
classification, link prediction and pattern discovery.

15.7 Embedding Subgraphs

Now that we have looked at ways of embedding nodes, we will now turn to
the task of embedding subgraphs. Here, the goal is to learn a continuous
vector representation, $$z_{S} \in \mathbb {R}^{d}$$, of an induced
subgraph G[S] of the graph G, where $$S \subseteq V$$. This
embedding, $$z_{S}$$, can then be used to make predictions about the
entire subgraph.
Most of the methods discussed in node embeddings can be extended to
subgraphs. The node embeddings and convolutional approaches discussed
earlier is used to generate embeddings for nodes and then additional
modules are applied to aggregate sets of node embeddings corresponding to
subgraphs. The primary distinction between the different approaches is how
they aggregate the set of node embeddings corresponding to a subgraph.

15.7.1 Sum-Based Approaches

Reference [12] introduced “convolutional molecular fingerprinting” to
represent subgraphs in molecular graph representations by summing all the
individual node embeddings in the subgraph
$$\begin{aligned} z_{S} = \sum \limits _{v_{i} \in S} z_{i} (15.22)
\end{aligned}$$
Reference [8] constructive intermediate embeddings, $$\eta _{i,j}$$,
corresponding to edges, $$(i,j) \in \mathcal {E}$$
$$\begin{aligned} \eta _{i,j}^{k} = \sigma (W_{\mathcal
{E}}^{k}\cdot COMBINE(x_{i},AGGREGATE(\{\eta _{l,i}^{k- (15.23)
1},\forall v_{l}\in \mathcal {N}(v_{i}) \setminus v_{j}\})))
\end{aligned}$$
These edge embeddings are then aggregated to form the node embeddings:
$$\begin{aligned} z^{i} = \sigma (W_{V}^{k}\cdot
COMBINE(x_{i},AGGREGATE(\{\eta _{i,l}^{K},\forall v_{l} \in (15.24)
\mathcal {N}(v_{i})\}))) \end{aligned}$$
Once these embeddings are computed, a simple element-wise sum to
combine the node embeddings for a subgraph.

15.7.2 Graph-Coarsening Approaches

References [3, 9] also employ convolutional approaches, but instead of
summing the node embeddings for the whole graph, they stack
convolutional and graph coarsening layers. In the graph coarsening layers,
the nodes are clustered together, and the clustered node embeddings are
combined using element-wise max-pooling. After clustering, the new
coarser graph is again fed through a convolutional encoder and the process
repeats.
Unlike the previous discussed convolutional approaches, there is
considerable emphasis placed on designing convolutional encoders based
upon the graph Fourier transform. However, because the graph Fourier
transform requires identifying and manipulating the eigenvectors of the
graph Laplacian, naive versions of these approaches are necessarily
$$O(|V|^{3})$$. State-of-the-art approximations to these spectral
approaches are discussed in [2].

15.8 Graph Neural Networks

Reference [26] discuss the graph neural network (GNN) where instead of
aggregating information from neighbours, the idea is that subgraphs can be
viewed as specifying a compute graph, i.e, a recipe for accumulating and
passing information between nodes.
 Every node, $$v_{i}$$, is initialized with a random embedding,
$$h_{i}^{0}$$, and at each iteration of the GNN algorithm, nodes
accumulate inputs from their neighbours using simple neural network layers
$$\begin{aligned} h_{i}^{k} = \sum \limits _{v_{j} \in \mathcal (15.25)
{N}(v_{i})}\sigma (Wh_{j}^{k-1} + b) \end{aligned}$$
where $$W \in \mathbb {R}^{d \times d}$$ and
$$b \in \mathbb {R}^{d}$$ are trainable parameters and
$$\sigma $$ is a non-linearity. Equation 15.25 is repeatedly applied in
a recursive fashion until the embeddings converge, and special care must be
taken during initialization to ensure convergence. Once the embeddings
have converged, they are aggregated for the entire (sub)graph and this
aggregated embedding is used for subgraph classification. The paper
suggests that the aggregation can be done by introducing a “dummy” super-
node that is connected to all nodes in the target subgraph.
Reference [20] extend and modify the GNN framework to use Gated
Recurrent Units and back propagation through time, which removes the
need to run the recursion in Eq. 15.25 to convergence. Adapting the GNN
framework to use modern recurrent units also allows the leverage of node
attributes and to use the output of intermediate embeddings of subgraphs.
The GNN framework is highly expressive, but it is also computationally
intensive compared to the convolutional approaches, due to the
complexities of ensuring convergence or running back propagation through
time. Thus, unlike the convolutional approaches, which are most commonly
used to classify molecular graphs in large datasets, the GNN approach has
been used for more complex, but smaller scale, tasks, e.g., for approximate
formal verification using graph-based representations of programs.

References
1. Ahmed, Amr, Nino Shervashidze, Shravan Narayanamurthy, Vanja Josifovski, and Alexander J.
Smola. Distributed large-scale natural graph factorization. In Proceedings of the 22nd
international conference on World Wide Web, 37–48. ACM, 2013.

2. Bronstein, Michael, M., Joan Bruna, Yann LeCun, Arthur Szlam, and Pierre Vandergheynst.
2017. Geometric deep learning: Going beyond Euclidean data. IEEE Signal Processing
Magazine 34 (4): 18–42.

3. Bruna, Joan, Wojciech Zaremba, Arthur Szlam, and Yann LeCun. 2013. Spectral networks and
locally connected networks on graphs. arXiv:1312.6203.
4. Cao, Shaosheng, Wei Lu, and Qiongkai Xu. 2015. Grarep: Learning graph representations with
global structural information. In Proceedings of the 24th ACM international on conference on
information and knowledge management, 891–900. ACM.

5. Cao, Shaosheng, Wei Lu, and Qiongkai Xu. 2016. Deep neural networks for learning graph
representations. In AAAI, 1145–1152.

6. Chang, Shiyu, Wei Han, Jiliang Tang, Guo-Jun Qi, Charu C. Aggarwal, and Thomas S. Huang.
2015. Heterogeneous network embedding via deep architectures. In Proceedings of the 21st
ACM SIGKDD international conference on knowledge discovery and data mining, 119–128.
ACM.

7. Chen, Haochen, Bryan Perozzi, Yifan Hu, and Steven Skiena. 2017. Harp: Hierarchical
representation learning for networks. arXiv:1706.07845.

8. Dai, Hanjun, Bo Dai, and Le Song. 2016. Discriminative embeddings of latent variable models
for structured data. In International conference on machine learning, 2702–2711.

9. Defferrard, Michaël, Xavier Bresson, and Pierre Vandergheynst. 2016. Convolutional neural
networks on graphs with fast localized spectral filtering. In Advances in neural information
processing systems, 3844–3852.

10. Dong, Yuxiao, Nitesh V. Chawla, and Ananthram Swami. 2017. metapath2vec: Scalable
representation learning for heterogeneous networks. In Proceedings of the 23rd ACM SIGKDD
international conference on knowledge discovery and data mining, 135–144. ACM.

11. Donnat, Claire, Marinka Zitnik, David Hallac, and Jure Leskovec. 2017. Spectral graph wavelets
for structural role similarity in networks. arXiv:1710.10321.

12. Duvenaud, David K., Dougal Maclaurin, Jorge Iparraguirre, Rafael Bombarell, Timothy Hirzel,
Alán Aspuru-Guzik, and Ryan P. Adams. 2015. Convolutional networks on graphs for learning
molecular fingerprints. In Advances in neural information processing systems, 2224–2232.

13. Grover, Aditya, and Jure Leskovec. 2016. node2vec: Scalable feature learning for networks. In
Proceedings of the 22nd ACM SIGKDD international conference on knowledge discovery and
data mining, 855–864. ACM.

14. Hamilton, Will, Zhitao Ying, and Jure Leskovec. 2017. Inductive representation learning on
large graphs. In Advances in neural information processing systems, 1025–1035.

15. Hamilton, William L., Rex Ying, and Jure Leskovec. 2017. Representation learning on graphs:
Methods and applications. arXiv:1709.05584.

16. Hinton, Geoffrey E., and Ruslan R Salakhutdinov. 2006. Reducing the dimensionality of data
with neural networks. Science 313 (5786): 504–507.

17. Hochreiter, Sepp, and Jürgen Schmidhuber. 1997. Long short-term memory. Neural Computation
9 (8): 1735–1780.

18. Kipf, Thomas N., and Max Welling. 2016. Semi-supervised classification with graph
convolutional networks. arXiv:1609.02907.
19.
 Kipf, Thomas N., and Max Welling. 2016. Variational graph auto-encoders. arXiv:1611.07308.

20. Li, Yujia, Daniel Tarlow, Marc Brockschmidt, and Richard Zemel. 2015. Gated graph sequence
neural networks. arXiv:1511.05493.

21. Nickel, Maximilian, Kevin Murphy, Volker Tresp, and Evgeniy Gabrilovich. 2016. A review of
relational machine learning for knowledge graphs. Proceedings of the IEEE 104 (1): 11–33.

22. Ou, Mingdong, Peng Cui, Jian Pei, Ziwei Zhang, and Wenwu Zhu. 2016. Asymmetric
transitivity preserving graph embedding. In Proceedings of the 22nd ACM SIGKDD
international conference on knowledge discovery and data mining, 1105–1114. ACM.

23. Perozzi, Bryan, Rami Al-Rfou, and Steven Skiena. 2014. Deepwalk: Online learning of social
representations. In Proceedings of the 20th ACM SIGKDD international conference on
knowledge discovery and data mining, 701–710. ACM.

24. Pham, Trang, Truyen Tran, Dinh Q. Phung, and Svetha Venkatesh. 2017. Column networks for
collective classification. In AAAI, 2485–2491.

25. Ribeiro, Leonardo FR., Pedro HP. Saverese, and Daniel R. Figueiredo. 2017. struc2vec:
Learning node representations from structural identity. In Proceedings of the 23rd ACM
SIGKDD international conference on knowledge discovery and data mining, 385–394. ACM.

26. Scarselli, Franco, Marco Gori, Ah Chung Tsoi, Markus Hagenbuchner, and Gabriele Monfardini.
2009. The graph neural network model. IEEE Transactions on Neural Networks 20 (1): 61–80.

27. Schlichtkrull, Michael, Thomas N. Kipf, Peter Bloem, Rianne van den Berg, Ivan Titov, and
Max Welling. 2017. Modeling relational data with graph convolutional networks. arXiv:1703.
06103.

28. Tang, Jian, Meng Qu, Mingzhe Wang, Ming Zhang, Jun Yan, and Qiaozhu Mei. 2015. Line:
Large-scale information network embedding. In Proceedings of the 24th international
conference on World Wide Web, 1067–1077. (International World Wide Web Conferences
Steering Committee).

29. van den Berg, Rianne, Thomas N. Kipf, and Max Welling. 2017. Graph convolutional matrix
completion. Statistics 1050: 7.

30. Wang, Daixin, Peng Cui, and Wenwu Zhu. 2016. Structural deep network embedding. In
Proceedings of the 22nd ACM SIGKDD international conference on knowledge discovery and
data mining, 1225–1234. ACM.

31. Zitnik, Marinka, and Jure Leskovec. 2017. Predicting multicellular function through multi-layer
tissue networks. Bioinformatics 33 (14): i190–i198.
Index
A
Absolute spam mass
Absolute status
Acquaintance networks
Action
Active node
Adjacency-based proximity measure
Adjacency list
Adjacency matrix
Affiliation network
African-American
Age
Agglomerative graph partitioning methods
Aggregated neighbourhood vector
Aggregation function
Alfréd Rényi
Ally request
Amazon.com
Ambassador node
Anchor
Approximate balanced graph
Approximate betweenness centrality
Approximation algorithm
ARPANET
Articulation vertex
Artificial sink
Asynchronous IO
Atomic propagation
Authorities
Authority score
Authority Update rule
Autoencoder objective
Autonomous system
Average clustering coefficient
Average degeneracy
Average degree
Average distance
Average neighbourhood size
Average out-degree estimate
Average path length
B
Backtracking
Backward BFS traversal
Backward burning probability
Backward direction
Backward-forward step
Bacon number
Balance heuristic
Balance theorem
Balance-based reasoning
Balanced
Balanced dataset
Balanced graph
Balanced triad
BalanceDet
BalanceLrn
Ball of radius
Ballot-blind prediction
Barrel
B-ary tree
Base Set
Basic PageRank Update rule
Basic reproductive number
Basis set
Batch-mode crawler
Battle of the Water Sensor Networks
Bayesian inference method
Behaviour
Béla Bollobás
Benefit-cost greedy algorithm
Bernoulli distribution
Betweenness
BFS algorithm
BFS traversals
BigFiles
Bilingual
Bimodal
Binary action vector
Binary classification label
Binary evaluation vectors
Binary tree structure
Binomial distribution
Bipartite graph
Bipolar
BitTorrent
Blog
Blogspace
Blue chip stock holders
Bollobás configuration model
Boosting nodes
Boston
Boston random group
Bowtie
Bradford law
Branching process
Breadth first searches
Breadth-first search
Bridge edge
Brilliant-but-cruel hypothesis
B-tree index
Burst of activity
C
California
Cambridge
Cascade
Cascade capacity
Cascading failure
Caucasian
CELF optimization
CELF++
Center-surround convolutional kernel
Chain lengths
Chord
Chord software
Classification accuracy
Cloning
Cloning step
Cluster
Clustering
Clustering coefficient
Co-citation
Collaboration graph
Collaborative filtering systems
Collection analysis module
Collective action
Columbia small world study
Columbia University
Column networks
Comments
Common knowledge
Community
Community discovery
Community Guided Attachment
Complete cascade
Complete crawl
Complete graph
Completely connected
Complex systems
Component
Component size distribution
Computed product-average star rating
Conceptual distance
Concurrency
Conductance
Configuration
Conformity hypothesis
Connected
Connected component
Connected components
Connected undirected graph
Connectivity
Consistent hashing
Constrained triad dynamics
Constructive intermediate embedding
Contact network
Contagion
Contagion probability
Contagion threshold
Content Addressable Network
Content creation
Content similarity
Contextualized link
Continuous vector representation
Convolutional
Convolutional coarsening layer
Convolutional encoder
Convolutional molecular fingerprinting
Coordination game
Copying model
Cost-Effective Forward selection algorithm
Cost-Effective Lazy Forward
Cost-Effective Lazy Forward selection algorithm
CouchSurfing.com
Crawl and stop
Crawl and stop with threshold
Crawl control
Crawler
Crawler revisit frequency
Crawling
Crestline
Critical number
Cross-entropy loss
Cross-validation approach
Cultural fad
Cut
Cut clustering algorithm
Cycle
D
Dampened trust score
Dark-web
Datastore
Decentralized algorithm
Decentralized search
Decision-making
Decoder
Decoder mapping
Decoder proximity value
Deep learning
Deep Neural Graph Representations
DeepWalk
Degeneracy
Degree
Degree assortativity
Degree-based navigation
Degree centrality
Degree discount
Degree distribution
Degree of separation
DELICIOUS
Dendrogram
Dense neural network layer
Densification power-law
Dependency
Deterministic Kronecker graph
Diameter
Differential status
Diffusion
Diffusion of norm
Diffusion-based algorithm
Dimensionality reduction
Dip
Direct encoding
Direct propagation
Directed acyclic graph
Directed graph
Directed multigraph
Directed self-looped graph
Directed unweighted graph
Directed weighted graph
$$DISCONNECTED\ COMPONENT $$
Disconnected graph
Disconnected undirected graph
Dispersion
Distance
Distance centrality
Distance-Dependent Kronecker graphs
Distance-dependent Kronecker operator
Distance distribution
Distance matrix
Distributed greedy algorithm
Distrust propagations
Divisive graph partitioning methods
DNS cache
DNS lookup
DocID
DocIndex
Document stream
Dodds
Dose-response model
$$d $$ -regular graph
DumpLexicon
Dynamic monopoly
Dynamic network
Dynamic programming
Dynamic routing table
Dynamo
E
EachMovie
Early adopters
Edge attributes
Edge destination selection process
Edge embedding
Edge initiation process
Edge list
Edge reciprocation
Edges
Edge sign prediction
EDonkey2000
Effective diameter
Effective number of vertices
Egalitarian
Ego
Ego-networks
Eigen exponent
Eigenvalue propagation
Element-wise max-pooling
Element-wise mean
Embeddedness
Embedding lookup
Embedding space
Encoder
Encoder-decoder
Encoder mapping
Enhanced-clustering cache replacement
EPANET simulator
Epinions
Equilibrium
Erdös number
Essembly.com
Evaluation function
Evaluation-similarity
Evolutionary model
Exact betweenness centrality
Expansion
Expectation Maximisation
Expected penalty
Expected penalty reduction
Expected profit lift
Expected value navigation
Exponent
Exponential attenuation
Exponential distribution
Exponential tail
Exposure
F
Facebook
Facebook friends
Facebook user
Faction membership
Factor
FastTrack
Fault-tolerance
Feature vector
Finger table
First-order graph proximity
Fixed deterministic distance measure
FLICKR
Foe
Folded graph
Forest Fire
Forest Fire model
Forward BFS traversal
Forward burning probability
Forward direction
Four degrees of separation
Freenet
Frequency
Frequency ratio
Frequency table
Freshness
Friend
Friend request
Friends-of-friends
Fully Bayesian approach
G
Gated recurrent unit
General threshold model
Generating functions
Generative baseline
Generative surprise
Geographic distance
Geographical proximity
Giant component
Girvan-Newman algorithm
Global cascade
Global information diffusion
Global inverted file
Global profit lift
Global rounding
Gnutella
Goodness
Goodness-of-fit
Google
``Go with the winners'' algorithm
Graph
Graph coarsening layer
Graph coarsening procedure
Graph convolutional networks
Graph Factorization algorithm
Graph Fourier transform
Graph neural networks
Graph structure
GraphSAGE algorithm
GraphWave
GraRep
Greedy search
Grid
Group-induced model
Group structure
Growth power-law
H
Hadoop
Half-edges
Hand-engineered heuristic
HARP
Hash-based organization
Hash-bucket
Hash distribution policy
Hashing mapping
Hashtags
Heat kernel
Helpfulness
Helpfulness evaluation
Helpfulness ratio
Helpfulness vote
Hierarchical clustering
Hierarchical distance
Hierarchical model
Hierarchical softmax
High-speed streaming
Hill- climbing approach
Hill climbing search
Hit
Hit list
Hive
Hollywood
Homophily
Honey pot
Hop distribution
HOPE
Hop-plot exponent
Hops-to-live limit
Hops-to-live value
Hot pages
Hub
Hub-authority update
Hub score
Hub Update rule
Human wayfinding
Hybrid hashed-log organization
HyperANF algorithm
HyperLogLog counter
I
Ideal chain lengths frequency distribution
Identifier
Identifier circle
Ignorant trust function
$$IN $$
In
Inactive node
Incentive compatible mechanism
Income stratification
Incremental function
In-degree
In-degree distribution
In-degree heuristic
Independent cascade model
Indexer
Index sequential access mode
Individual-bias hypothesis
Indivisible
Infected
Infinite grid
Infinite-inventory
Infinite line
Infinite paths
Infinite-state automaton
Influence
Influence maximization problem
Influence weights
Influential
Information linkage graph
Initiator graph
Initiator matrix
In-links
Inner-product decoder
Innovation
In-place update
Instance matrix
Instant messenger
Interaction
Inter-cluster cut
Inter-cluster weight
Interest Driven
Intermediaries
Internet
Internet Protocol
Intra-cluster cut
Intrinsic value
Inverted index
Inverted list
Inverted PageRank
Irrelevant event
Isolated vertex
Iterative propagation
J
Joint positive endorsement
K
Kademlia
Kansas
Kansas study
KaZaA
$$k $$ -core
Kernighan-Lin algorithm
Kevin Bacon
Key algorithm
$$k $$ -hop neighbourhood
KL-divergence metric
Kleinberg model
$$k $$ -regular graph
Kronecker graph
Kronecker graph product
Kronecker-like multiplication
Kronecker product
KRONEM algorithm
KRONFIT
L
Laplacian eigenmaps objective
Lattice distance
Lattice points
Lazy evaluation
Lazy replication
LDAG algorithm
Least recently used cache
Leave-one-out cross-validation
Leaves
Like
Likelihood ratio test
LINE method
Linear threshold model
LINKEDIN
Link prediction
Link probability
Link probability measure
Links
Links database
LiveJournal
LiveJournal population density
LiveJournal social network
Local bridge
Local contacts
Local inverted file
Local rounding
Local triad dynamics
Location Driven
Login correlation
Logistic regression
Logistic regression classifier
Log-log plot
Log-structured file
Log-structured organization
Long-range contacts
Long tail
LOOK AHEAD OPTIMIZATION
Lookup table
Los Angeles
Lotka distribution
Low-dimensional embedding
Low neighbour growth
LSTM
M
Machine learning
Macroscopic structure
Mailing lists
Majority rounding
Marginal gain
Marketing action
Marketing plan
Markov chain
Massachusetts
Mass-based spam detection algorithm
Matching algorithm
Matrix-factorization
Maximal subgraph
Maximum likelihood estimation
Maximum likelihood estimation technique
Maximum number of edges
Max-likelihood attrition rate
Max-pooling neural network
Mean-squared-error loss
Message-forwarding experiment
Message funneling
Message passing
Metropolis sampling algorithm
Metropolized Gibbs sampling approach
Microsoft Messenger instant-messaging system
Minimum cut
Minimum cut clustering
Minimum cut tree
Minimum description length approach
Missing past
Mobile call graph
Model A
Model B
Model C
Model D
Modularity
Modularity matrix
Modularity penalty
Molecular graph representation
Monitored node
Monotone threshold function
Monte Carlo switching steps
M-step trust function
Muhamad
Multicore breadth first search
Multifractal network generator
Multigraph
Multi-objective problem
Multiple ambassadors
Multiple edge
Multiplex propagation
N
Naive algorithm
Natural greedy hill-climbing strategy
Natural self-diminishing property
Natural-world graph
Navigable
Navigation agents
Navigation algorithm
Nebraska
Nebraska random group
Nebraska study
Negative attitude
Negative opinion
Negative sampling
Negative spam mass
Neighbourhood aggregation algorithm
Neighbourhood aggregation method
Neighbourhood function
Neighbourhood graph
Neighbourhood information
Neighbourhood overlap
Neighbours
Neighbour set
Nemesis request
Network
Network value
Neural network layer
New York
Newman-Zipf
Node arrival process
Node classification
Node embedding
Node embedding approach
Node-independent
Node-independent path
Nodes
Node2vec
Node2vec optimization algorithm
Noisy Stochastic Kronecker graph model
Non-dominated solution
Non-navigable graph
Non-searchable
Non-searchable graph
Non-simple path
Non-unique friends-of-friends
Normalizing factor
NP-hard
Null model
O
Occupation similarity
Ohio
OhmNet
Omaha
$$1 $$ -ball
One-hop neighbourhood
One-hot indicator vector
One-step distrust
Online contaminant monitoring system
Online social applications
Optimal marketing plan
Oracle function
Ordered degree sequence
Ordered trust property
Ordinary influencers
Organizational hierarchy
Orphan
$$OUT $$
Out
Outbreak detection
Outbreak detection problem
Out-degree
Out-degree distribution
Out-degree exponent
Out-degree heuristic
Out-links
Overloading
Overnet
P
Page addition/insertion
Page change frequency
PageRank
PageRank contribution
Pagerank threshold
PageRank with random jump distribution
Page repository
Pages
Pairwise decoder
Pairwise orderedness
Pairwise proximity measure
Paradise
Parameter matrix
Parent set
Pareto law
Pareto-optimal
Pareto-optimal solution
Partial cascade
Partial crawl
Participation rates
Pastry
Path
Path length
Pattern discovery
Paul Erdös
Payoff
Peer-To-Peer overlay networks
Penalty
Penalty reduction
Penalty reduction function
Permutation model
Persistence
Personal threshold
Personal threshold rule
Phantom edges
Phantom nodes
PHITS algorithm
Physical page organization
Pluralistic ignorance
Poisson distribution
Poisson's law
Polling game
Polylogarithmic
Polysemy
Popularity Driven
Positive attitude
Positive opinion
Positivity
Power law
Power law degree distribution
Power-law distribution
Power law random graph models
Predecessor pointer
Prediction error
Preferential attachment
Preferential attachment model
Pre-processing step
Principle of Repeated Improvement
Probability of persistence
Probit slope parameter
Product average
Professional ties
Propagated distrust
Proper social network
Proportional refresh policy
Protein-protein interaction graph
Proxy requests
Pseudo-unique random number
P-value
Q
Quality-only straw-man hypothesis
Quantitative collaborative filtering algorithm
Quasi-stationary dynamic state
Query engine
R
Random access
Random-failure hypothesis
Random graph
Random initial seeders
Random jump vector
Random page access
Random walk
Rank
Rank exponent
Ranking
Rating
Realization matrix
Real-world graph
Real-world systems
Receptive baseline
Receptive surprise
Recommendation network
Recommender systems
Register
Regular directed graph
Regular graph
Reinforcement learning
Relative spam mass
Relevant event
Removed
Representation learning
Representation learning techniques
Request hit ratio
Resolution
Resource-sharing
Reviews
Rich-get-richer phenomenon
R-MAT model
Root Set
Roster
Rounding methods
Routing path
Routing table
S
SALSA algorithm
Scalability
Scalable
Scalarization
Scaled PageRank Update rule
Scale-free
Scale-free model
Scaling
SCC algorithm
Searchable
Searchable graph
Search engine
Searcher
Searching
Search query
Second-order encoder-decoder objective
Second-order graph proximity
Self-edge
Self-loop
Self-looped edge
Self-looped graph
Sensor
Seven degree of separation
Shadowing
Sharon
Sibling page
Sigmoid function
Sign
Signed-difference analysis
Signed network
Similarity
Similarity-based navigation
Similarity function
SIMPATH
Simple path
Simple Summary Statistics
Single pass
Sink vertex
SIR epidemic model
SIR model
SIRS epidemic model
SIRS model
SIS epidemic model
Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon
Six degrees of separation
Slashdot
Small world
Small world phenomena
Small world phenomenon
Small world property
Small-world acquaintance graph
Small-world experiment
Small-world hypothesis
Small-world models
Small-world structure
SNAP
Social epidemics
Social intelligence
Social network
Social similarity
Social stratification
Sorter
Source vertex
Spam
Spam detection
Spam farms
Spam mass
Spectral analysis
Spectral graph wavelet
Spid
Stack Overflow
Staircase effects
Stanley Milgram
Star rating
Starting population bias
State transition
Static score distribution vector
Status heuristic
Status-based reasoning
StatusDet
StatusLrn
Steepest-ascent hill-climbing search
Stickiness
Stochastic averaging
Stochastic Kronecker graph model
Stochastic process
Storage
Storage nodes
Store Server
Strategic alliance
Straw-man quality-only hypothesis
Streaming access
Strongly Connected Component (SCC)
Strongly connected directed graph
Strong ties
Strong Triadic Closure property
Structural balance
Structural balance property
Structural Deep Network Embeddings
Structural role
Structured P2P networks
Structure index
Struc2vec
Subgraph classification
Submodular
Submodularity
Subscriptions
Successor
Super-spreaders
Supernodes
Superseeders
Supervised learning
Surprise
Susceptible
Susceptible-Infected-Removed cycle
Switching algorithm
Synonymy
Systolic approach
T
Tag-similarity
Tapestry
Targeted immunization
Target node
Target reachability
Technological graph
Temporal graph
$$TENDRILS $$
Text index
Theory of balance
Theory of status
Theory of structural balance
Theory of triad types
Threshold
Threshold rule
Threshold trust property
Tightly-knit community
Time-expanded network
Time graph
Time-outs
Time-To-Live
Topic
Topic drift
Tracer cards
Traditional information retrieval
Transient contact network
Transpose trust
Triadic closure property
Triggering model
Triggering set
True value
Trust
Trust coupling
Trust dampening
Trust function
Trust only
TrustRank algorithm
Trust splitting
Twitter idiom hashtag
Two-hop adjacency neighbourhood
U
Unbalanced
Unbalanced graph
Undirected component
Undirected graph
Undirected multigraph
Undirected self-looped graph
Undirected unweighted graph
Undirected weighted graph
Uniform distribution policy
Uniform immunization programmes
Uniform random $$d $$ -regular graph
Uniform random jump distribution
Uniform refresh policy
Uniform sampling
Union-Find
$$unique $$
Unique friends-of-friends
Unit cost algorithm
Unit-cost greedy algorithm
Unstructured P2P network
Unsupervised learning
Unweighted graph
Urban myth
URL Resolver
URL Server
User evaluation
Utility index
V
Variance-to-mean ratio
VERTEX COVER OPTIMIZATION
Vertices
Viceroy
Viral marketing
Visualization
W
Walk
Water distribution system
Watts
Watts–Strogatz model
WCC algorithm
WeakBalDet
Weakly connected directed graph
Weak structural balance property
Weak ties
Web
Webbiness
Web crawls
Weighted auxillary graph
Weighted cascade
Weighted graph
Weighted linear combinations
Weighted path count
Who-talks-to-whom graph
who-transacts-with-whom graph
Wichita
Wikipedia
Wikipedia adminship election
Wikipedia adminship voting network
Wikispeedia
Word-level parallelism
Y
YAHOO ANSWERS
Z
Zachary Karate Club network
Zero-crossing
Zipf distribution
Zipf law