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Hauptverfasser: Dreveton, Maximilien, Chucri, Charbel, Grossglauser, Matthias, Thiran, Patrick
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2024
Schlagworte:
Online-Zugang:https://arxiv.org/abs/2406.03852
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author Dreveton, Maximilien
Chucri, Charbel
Grossglauser, Matthias
Thiran, Patrick
author_facet Dreveton, Maximilien
Chucri, Charbel
Grossglauser, Matthias
Thiran, Patrick
contents The metric backbone of a weighted graph is the union of all-pairs shortest paths. It is obtained by removing all edges $(u,v)$ that are not the shortest path between $u$ and $v$. In networks with well-separated communities, the metric backbone tends to preserve many inter-community edges, because these edges serve as bridges connecting two communities, but tends to delete many intra-community edges because the communities are dense. This suggests that the metric backbone would dilute or destroy the community structure of the network. However, this is not borne out by prior empirical work, which instead showed that the metric backbone of real networks preserves the community structure of the original network well. In this work, we analyze the metric backbone of a broad class of weighted random graphs with communities, and we formally prove the robustness of the community structure with respect to the deletion of all the edges that are not in the metric backbone. An empirical comparison of several graph sparsification techniques confirms our theoretical finding and shows that the metric backbone is an efficient sparsifier in the presence of communities.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2406_03852
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Why the Metric Backbone Preserves Community Structure
Dreveton, Maximilien
Chucri, Charbel
Grossglauser, Matthias
Thiran, Patrick
Social and Information Networks
Machine Learning
Probability
The metric backbone of a weighted graph is the union of all-pairs shortest paths. It is obtained by removing all edges $(u,v)$ that are not the shortest path between $u$ and $v$. In networks with well-separated communities, the metric backbone tends to preserve many inter-community edges, because these edges serve as bridges connecting two communities, but tends to delete many intra-community edges because the communities are dense. This suggests that the metric backbone would dilute or destroy the community structure of the network. However, this is not borne out by prior empirical work, which instead showed that the metric backbone of real networks preserves the community structure of the original network well. In this work, we analyze the metric backbone of a broad class of weighted random graphs with communities, and we formally prove the robustness of the community structure with respect to the deletion of all the edges that are not in the metric backbone. An empirical comparison of several graph sparsification techniques confirms our theoretical finding and shows that the metric backbone is an efficient sparsifier in the presence of communities.
title Why the Metric Backbone Preserves Community Structure
topic Social and Information Networks
Machine Learning
Probability
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2406.03852