Strong and Weak Random Walks on Signed Networks

Fuente: arXiv
Guardado en:
Detalles Bibliográficos
Autores principales: Babul, Shazia'Ayn, Tian, Yu, Lambiotte, Renaud
Formato: Preprint
Publicado: 2024
Materias:
Acceso en línea:
Etiquetas: Agregar Etiqueta
Sin Etiquetas, Sea el primero en etiquetar este registro!
_version_ 1866909222282723328
author Babul, Shazia'Ayn
Tian, Yu
Lambiotte, Renaud
author_facet Babul, Shazia'Ayn
Tian, Yu
Lambiotte, Renaud
contents Random walks play an important role in probing the structure of complex networks. On traditional networks, they can be used to extract community structure, understand node centrality, perform link prediction, or capture the similarity between nodes. On signed networks, where the edge weights can be either positive or negative, it is non-trivial to design a random walk which can be used to extract information about the signed structure of the network, in particular the ability to partition the graph into communities with positive edges inside and negative edges in between. Prior works on signed network random walks focus on the case where there are only two such communities (strong balance), which is rarely the case in empirical networks. In this paper, we propose a signed network random walk which can capture the structure of a network with more than two such communities (weak balance). The walk results in a similarity matrix which can be used to cluster the nodes into antagonistic communities. We compare the characteristics of the so-called strong and weak random walks, in terms of walk length and stationarity. We show through a series of experiments on synthetic and empirical networks that the similarity matrix based on weak walks can be used for both unsupervised and semi-supervised clustering, outperforming the same similarity matrix based on strong walks when the graph has more than two communities, or exhibits asymmetry in the density of links. These results suggest that other random-walk based algorithms for signed networks could be improved simply by running them with weak walks instead of strong walks.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2406_08034
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Strong and Weak Random Walks on Signed Networks
Babul, Shazia'Ayn
Tian, Yu
Lambiotte, Renaud
Physics and Society
Machine Learning
Social and Information Networks
Dynamical Systems
Random walks play an important role in probing the structure of complex networks. On traditional networks, they can be used to extract community structure, understand node centrality, perform link prediction, or capture the similarity between nodes. On signed networks, where the edge weights can be either positive or negative, it is non-trivial to design a random walk which can be used to extract information about the signed structure of the network, in particular the ability to partition the graph into communities with positive edges inside and negative edges in between. Prior works on signed network random walks focus on the case where there are only two such communities (strong balance), which is rarely the case in empirical networks. In this paper, we propose a signed network random walk which can capture the structure of a network with more than two such communities (weak balance). The walk results in a similarity matrix which can be used to cluster the nodes into antagonistic communities. We compare the characteristics of the so-called strong and weak random walks, in terms of walk length and stationarity. We show through a series of experiments on synthetic and empirical networks that the similarity matrix based on weak walks can be used for both unsupervised and semi-supervised clustering, outperforming the same similarity matrix based on strong walks when the graph has more than two communities, or exhibits asymmetry in the density of links. These results suggest that other random-walk based algorithms for signed networks could be improved simply by running them with weak walks instead of strong walks.
title Strong and Weak Random Walks on Signed Networks
topic Physics and Society
Machine Learning
Social and Information Networks
Dynamical Systems
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2406.08034