Scalar embedding of temporal network trajectories

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Lacasa, Lucas, Marín-Rodríguez, F. Javier, Masuda, Naoki, Arola-Fernández, Lluís
Format: Preprint
Published: 2024
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author Lacasa, Lucas
Marín-Rodríguez, F. Javier
Masuda, Naoki
Arola-Fernández, Lluís
author_facet Lacasa, Lucas
Marín-Rodríguez, F. Javier
Masuda, Naoki
Arola-Fernández, Lluís
contents A temporal network -- a collection of snapshots recording the evolution of a network whose links appear and disappear dynamically -- can be interpreted as a trajectory in graph space. In order to characterize the complex dynamics of such trajectory via the tools of time series analysis and signal processing, it is sensible to preprocess the trajectory by embedding it in a low-dimensional Euclidean space. Here we argue that, rather than the topological structure of each network snapshot, the main property of the trajectory that needs to be preserved in the embedding is the relative graph distance between snapshots. This idea naturally leads to dimensionality reduction approaches that explicitly consider relative distances, such as Multidimensional Scaling (MDS) or identifying the distance matrix as a feature matrix in which to perform Principal Component Analysis (PCA). This paper provides a comprehensible methodology that illustrates this approach. Its application to a suite of generative network trajectory models and empirical data certify that nontrivial dynamical properties of the network trajectories are preserved already in their scalar embeddings, what enables the possibility of performing time series analysis in temporal networks.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2412_02715
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Scalar embedding of temporal network trajectories
Lacasa, Lucas
Marín-Rodríguez, F. Javier
Masuda, Naoki
Arola-Fernández, Lluís
Physics and Society
Social and Information Networks
Data Analysis, Statistics and Probability
A temporal network -- a collection of snapshots recording the evolution of a network whose links appear and disappear dynamically -- can be interpreted as a trajectory in graph space. In order to characterize the complex dynamics of such trajectory via the tools of time series analysis and signal processing, it is sensible to preprocess the trajectory by embedding it in a low-dimensional Euclidean space. Here we argue that, rather than the topological structure of each network snapshot, the main property of the trajectory that needs to be preserved in the embedding is the relative graph distance between snapshots. This idea naturally leads to dimensionality reduction approaches that explicitly consider relative distances, such as Multidimensional Scaling (MDS) or identifying the distance matrix as a feature matrix in which to perform Principal Component Analysis (PCA). This paper provides a comprehensible methodology that illustrates this approach. Its application to a suite of generative network trajectory models and empirical data certify that nontrivial dynamical properties of the network trajectories are preserved already in their scalar embeddings, what enables the possibility of performing time series analysis in temporal networks.
title Scalar embedding of temporal network trajectories
topic Physics and Society
Social and Information Networks
Data Analysis, Statistics and Probability
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2412.02715