Exploring complex networks by walking on them

An exhaustive analysis of the shape properties of discrete self-avoiding random walks is presented. The dependence of the main parameters of the probability distributions from the length of the walk and the differences between these distributions for conventional and self-avoiding walks are studied. By means of high-precision Monte Carlo simulations it is shown that the characteristics of the shape of self-avoiding random walks, when regarded as a function of the walk length, present the expected asymptotic behaviour. The differences with conventional random walks depend upon the observable considered: the probability distributions of the principal inertia eigenvalues of self-avoiding walks spread around the most probable value more widely than the corresponding distributions for unrestricted walks, while in the cases of the asphericity or ratios of inertia eigenvalues, the distributions for self-avoiding walks are somewhat more peaked than their counterparts for conventional random walks. Analytical expressions for the probability distributions of inertia moment ratios and the two-dimensional asphericity are given. For common random walks there is an excellent agreement between these analytical distributions and the Monte Carlo data. In this work it is established that this concordance is maintained if the same analytical distributions are applied to the self-avoiding case. This means that within the precision of the simulations the functional form of the mentioned distributions does not vary when passing from conventional to self-avoiding walks.

We consider the phenomena of entanglement of the two interacting self‐avoiding walks (SAW) situated in a member of the three‐dimensional Sierpinski Gasket (SG) fractal family. We focus our attention to determine number of point contacts between the two SAW paths M, which turns out to be a set of power laws whose characteristics depend predominantly on the interactions between SAW steps. The phase diagrams have been establised and corresponding values of the contact critical exponents φ, associated with the two‐path mutual contacts, have been found.

Polymers in highly confined geometries can display complex morphologies including ordered phases. A basic component of a theoretical analysis of their phase behavior in confined geometries is the knowledge of the number of possible single-chain conformations compatible with the geometrical restrictions and the established crystalline morphology. While the statistical properties of unrestricted self-avoiding random walks (SAWs) both on and off-lattice are very well known, the same is not true for SAWs in confined geometries. The purpose of this contribution is (a) to enumerate the number of SAWs on the simple cubic (SC) and face-centered cubic (FCC) lattices under confinement for moderate SAW lengths, and (b) to obtain an approximate expression for their behavior as a function of chain length, type of lattice, and degree of confinement. This information is an essential requirement for the understanding and prediction of entropy-driven phase transitions of model polymer chains under confinement. In addition, a simple geometric argument is presented that explains, to first order, the dependence of the number of restricted SAWs on the type of SAW origin.

Static step-step correlations for restricted and self-avoiding random walks (SARW) on quadratic and simple cubic lattices are studied with the help of Monte Carlo simulation technique. For the SARW ofN steps our results, for largeN tend to the theoretically predicted values. An analysis of the correlations for SARW in terms of the individual restrictions indicate that its value between steps at a distancer have a dominant contribution coming from the restriction prohibiting polygon closures of sides2r (r≧2). Our results also show that the contribution of successive restrictions to the mean-square end-to-end distance of a SARW decay with the same exponent as that of the correlations for the SARW.

Polymers in random media: An introduction

The structure of linear polymers modelled by self-avoiding random walks (SAWs) on the backbone of two-dimensional percolation clusters at criticality is studied. To this end, all possible SAW configurations of N steps on a single-backbone configuration are enumerated exactly, and averages over many backbone configurations are performed to extract the mean quantities of interest. We determine the critical exponents describing the structure of SAWs, in both Euclidean and topological space, and the corresponding mean distribution functions for the end-to-end distance after N steps. A relation between the exponents characterizing the asymptotic shape of these distributions and those describing the total number of SAWS of N steps on the backbone is suggested and supported by numerical results.

Information dissemination has become one of the most important services of communication networks. Modeling the diffusion of information through such networks is crucial for our modern information societies. In this work, novel models, segregating between useful and malicious types of information, are introduced, in order to better study Information Dissemination Dynamics (IDD) in wireless complex communication networks, and eventually allow taking into account special network features in IDD. According to the proposed models, and inspired from epidemiology, we investigate the IDD in various complex network types through the use of the Susceptible-Infected (SI) paradigm for useful information dissemination and the Susceptible-Infected-Susceptible (SIS) paradigm for malicious information spreading. We provide analysis and simulation results for both types of diffused information, in order to identify performance and robustness potentials for each dissemination process with respect to the characteristics of the underlying complex networking infrastructures. We demonstrate that the proposed approach can generically characterize IDD in wireless complex networks and reveal salient features of dissemination dynamics in each network type, which could eventually aid in the design of more advanced, robust, and efficient networks and services.

Asymmetry between odd and even node weight in complex networks

We show that the ‘erasing-larger-loops-first’ (ELLF) method, which was first introduced for erasing loops from the simple random walk on the Sierpiński gasket, does work also for non-Markov random walks, in particular, self-repelling walks to construct a new family of self-avoiding walks on the Sierpiński gasket. The one-parameter family constructed in this method continuously connects the loop-erased random walk and a self-avoiding walk which has the same asymptotic behavior as the ‘standard’ self-avoiding walk. We prove the existence of the scaling limit and study some path properties: The exponent $ν$ governing the short-time behavior of the scaling limit varies continuously in the parameter. The limit process is almost surely self-avoiding, while it has path Hausdorff dimension $1/ν $, which is strictly greater than $1$.

Complex network analysis which can be represented as graph has gained much interest from researchers recently. Analysis derived from complex network leading to a discovery of important group or community lies within the network. It imposes a significant challenge to computer scientists, physicists, and sociologists alike, to identify and discover the true meaning of community for complex network. Different community detection algorithms have been proposed in different perspective of almost similar aim of identifying the community. In this paper, we apply the modularity measurement on complex network and test the strengthness of community found by algorithm proposed. The main study focuses on the importance of having robust algorithm in detecting communities in different type of complex network. Experimental results show that the method is able to successfully separate community by achieving an ideal modularity value.

Signal propagation in complex networks

Nonnegative matrix factorization (NMF) has become a powerful model for community discovery in complex networks. Existing NMF-based methods for community discovery often factorize the corresponding adjacent matrix of complex networks to obtain its community indicator matrix. However, the adjacent matrix cannot represent the global structure feature of complex networks very well, and this leads to the performance degradation of community discovery. Besides, most of existing methods are not robust and scalable enough, so they are not effective to deal with complex networks with noises and large scales. Aiming at these problems above, in this paper we propose a method for community discovery using distributed robust NMF with SimRank similarity measure. This method selects SimRank measure to construct the feature matrix, which can more accurately represent the global structure feature of complex networks. To improve the robustness, we select $$\ell _{2,1}$$ norm instead of the widely used Frobenius norm to construct its NMF-based community discovery model. In addition, to improve the scalability, we implement its key components by using MapReduce distributed computing framework, including computing SimRank feature matrix and iteratively solving the NMF-based model for community discovery. We conduct extensive experiments on several typical complex networks. The results show that our method has better performance and robustness than other representative NMF-based methods for community discovery. Moreover, our method presents good scalability and hence can be used to discover communities in the large-scale complex networks.

Communities have proven to be one of the important topological features of complex networks and can be discovered in various aspects of life. Understanding these community structures help the researchers to unlock distinct characteristics of networks that are not visible otherwise. In this paper, a hybrid genetic algorithm with link strength-based local search strategy (HGALS) is proposed for solving the community detection problem. The local search method presented in the algorithm is faster than the traditional modularity-based search operations. Furthermore, different variants of link strength measures are used in the local search method that is useful for various types of complex networks. The HGALS algorithm is analysed using different community structure metrics and its outcome is compared with three evolutionary algorithms and seven non-evolutionary algorithm-based approaches. The results thus obtained from the comparisons with other algorithms show good performances of HGALS in most of the cases for identifying better community structures.

Complex networks are usually characterized in terms of their topological, spatial, or information-theoretic properties and combinations of the associated metrics are used to discriminate networks into different classes or categories. However, even with the present variety of characteristics at hand it still remains a subject of current research to appropriately quantify a network's complexity and correspondingly discriminate between different types of complex networks, like infrastructure or social networks, on such a basis. Here we explore the possibility to classify complex networks by means of a statistical complexity measure that has formerly been successfully applied to distinguish different types of chaotic and stochastic time series. It is composed of a network's averaged per-node entropic measure characterizing the network's information content and the associated Jenson-Shannon divergence as a measure of disequilibrium. We study 29 real-world networks and show that networks of the same category tend to cluster in distinct areas of the resulting complexity-entropy plane. We demonstrate that within our framework, connectome networks exhibit among the highest complexity while, e.g., transportation and infrastructure networks display significantly lower values. Furthermore, we demonstrate the utility of our framework by applying it to families of random scale-free and Watts-Strogatz model networks. We then show in a second application that the proposed framework is useful to objectively construct threshold-based networks, such as functional climate networks or recurrence networks, by choosing the threshold such that the statistical network complexity is maximized.

This study aims to present complex network models which analyze professional swimmers of 50-m freestyle Olympic competitions, comparing characteristics and variables that are considered performance determinants. This comparative research includes Olympic medalists’ versus non-medalists’ behavior. Using data from 40 athletes with a mean age, weight and height of 26 ± 2.9 years, 87 ± 5.59 kg, 193 ± 3.85 cm, respectively, at the Olympics of 2000, 2004, 2008, 2012, and 2016 (16-year interval), we built two types of complex networks (graphs) for each edition, using mathematical correlations, metrics and the spectral decomposition analysis. It is possible to show that complex metrics behave differently between medalists and non-medalists. The spectral radius (SR) proved to be an important form of evaluation since in all 5 editions it was higher among medalists (SR results: 3.75, 3.5, 3.39, 2.91, and 3.66) compared to non-medalists (2.18, 2.51, 2.23, 2.07, and 2.04), with significantly differences between. This study introduces a remarkable tool in the evaluation of the performance of groups of swimming athletes by complex networks, and is relevant to athletes, coaches, and even amateurs, regarding how individual variables relate to competition results and are reflected in the SR for the best performance. In addition, this is a general method and may, in the future, be developed in the analysis of other competitive sports.