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1. A Model for Ant Trail Formation and its Convergence Properties

   https://doi.org/10.4230/LIPIcs.ITCS.2021.85  

   Charikar, Moses ; Garg, Shivam ; Gordon, Deborah M. ; Shiragur, Kirankumar ( January 2021 , 12th Innovations in Theoretical Computer Science Conference (ITCS 2021))

   null (Ed.)

   We introduce a model for ant trail formation, building upon previous work on biologically feasible local algorithms that plausibly describe how ants maintain trail networks. The model is a variant of a reinforced random walk on a directed graph, where ants lay pheromone on edges as they traverse them and the next edge to traverse is chosen based on the level of pheromone; this pheromone decays with time. There is a bidirectional flow of ants in the network: the forward flow proceeds along forward edges from source (e.g. the nest) to sink (e.g. a food source), and the backward flow in the opposite direction. Some fraction of ants are lost as they pass through each node (modeling the loss of ants due to exploration observed in the field). We initiate a theoretical study of this model. We note that ant navigation has inspired the field of ant colony optimization, heuristics that have been applied to several combinatorial optimization problems; however the algorithms developed there are considerably more complex and not constrained to being biologically feasible. We first consider the linear decision rule, where the flow divides itself among the next set of edges in proportion to their pheromone level. Here, we show that the process converges to the path with minimum leakage when the forward and backward flows do not change over time. On the other hand, when the forward and backward flows increase over time (caused by positive reinforcement from the discovery of a food source, for example), we show that the process converges to the shortest path. These results are for graphs consisting of two parallel paths (a case that has been investigated before in experiments). Through simulations, we show that these results hold for more general graphs drawn from various random graph models; proving this convergence in the general case is an interesting open problem. Further, to understand the behaviour of other decision rules beyond the linear rule, we consider a general family of decision rules. For this family, we show that there is no advantage of using a non-linear decision rule, if the goal is to find the shortest or the minimum leakage path. We also show that bidirectional flow is necessary for convergence to such paths. Our results provide a plausible explanation for field observations, and open up new avenues for further theoretical and experimental investigation. 

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2. Truss-based Community Search: a Truss-equivalence Based Indexing Approach

   Akbas, Esra ; Zhao, Peixiang ( January 2017 , Proceedings of the VLDB Endowment)

   We consider the community search problem defined upon a large graph G: given a query vertex q in G, to find as output all the densely connected subgraphs of G, each of which contains the query v. As an online, query-dependent variant of the well-known community detection problem, community search enables personalized community discovery that has found widely varying applications in real-world, large-scale graphs. In this paper, we study the community search problem in the truss-based model aimed at discovering all dense and cohesive k-truss communities to which the query vertex q belongs. We introduce a novel equivalence relation, k-truss equivalence, to model the intrinsic density and cohesiveness of edges in k-truss communities. Consequently, all the edges of G can be partitioned to a series of k-truss equivalence classes that constitute a space-efficient, truss-preserving index structure, EquiTruss. Community search can be henceforth addressed directly upon EquiTruss without repeated, time-demanding accesses to the original graph, G, which proves to be theoretically optimal. In addition, EquiTruss can be efficiently updated in a dynamic fashion when G evolves with edge insertion and deletion. Experimental studies in real-world, large-scale graphs validate the efficiency and effectiveness of EquiTruss, which has achieved at least an order of magnitude speedup in community search over the state-of-the-art method, TCP-Index. 

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3. YACC: A Framework Generalizing TuránShadow for Counting Large Cliques

   Shweta Jain, Hanghang Tong ( April 2022 , SDM2022)

   Clique-counting is a fundamental problem that has application in many areas eg. dense subgraph discovery, community detection, spam detection, etc. The problem of k-clique-counting is difficult because as k increases, the number of k-cliques goes up exponentially. Enumeration algorithms (even parallel ones) fail to count k-cliques beyond a small k. Approximation algorithms, like TuránShadow have been shown to perform well upto k = 10, but are inefficient for larger cliques. The recently proposed Pivoter algorithm significantly improved the state-of-the-art and was able to give exact counts of all k-cliques in a large number of graphs. However, the clique counts of some graphs (for example, com-lj) are still out of reach of these algorithms. We revisit the TuránShadow algorithm and propose a generalized framework called YACC that leverages several insights about real-world graphs to achieve faster clique-counting. The bottleneck in TuránShadow is a recursive subroutine whose stopping condition is based on a classic result from extremal combinatorics called Turán's theorem. This theorem gives a lower bound for the k-clique density in a subgraph in terms of its edge density. However, this stopping condition is based on a worst-case graph that does not reflect the nature of real-world graphs. Using techniques for quickly discovering dense subgraphs, we relax the stopping condition in a systematic way such that we get a smaller recursion tree while still maintaining the guarantees provided by TuránShadow. We deploy our algorithm on several real-world data sets and show that YACC reduces the size of the recursion tree and the running time by over an order of magnitude. Using YACC, we are able to obtain clique counts for several graphs for which clique-counting was infeasible before, including com-lj. 

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4. Skeleton coupling: a novel interlayer mapping of community evolution in temporal networks

   https://doi.org/10.1093/comnet/cnae011  

   Kilic, Bengier Ülgen ; Muldoon, Sarah Feldt ( March 2024 , Journal of Complex Networks)

   Dynamic community detection (DCD) in temporal networks is a complicated task that involves the selection of a method and its associated hyperparameters. How to choose the most appropriate method generally depends on the type of network being analysed and the specific properties of the data that define the network. In functional temporal networks derived from neuronal spike train data, communities are expected to be transient, and it is common for the network to contain multiple singleton communities. Here, we compare the performance of different DCD methods on functional temporal networks built from synthetic neuronal time series data with known community structure. We find that, for these networks, DCD methods that utilize interlayer links to perform community carry over between layers outperform other methods. However, we also observe that DCD performance is highly dependent on the topology of interlayer links, especially in the presence of singleton and transient communities. We therefore define a novel way of defining interlayer links in temporal networks called skeleton coupling that is specifically designed to enhance the linkage of communities in the network throughout time based on the topological properties of the community history. We show that integrating skeleton coupling with current DCD methods improves the method’s performance in synthetic data with planted singleton and transient communities. The use of skeleton coupling to perform DCD will therefore allow for more accurate and interpretable results of community evolution in real-world neuronal data or in other systems with transient structure and singleton communities.

    

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5. Efficient community detection in multilayer networks using boolean compositions

   https://doi.org/10.3389/fdata.2023.1144793  

   Santra, Abhishek ; Irany, Fariba Afrin ; Madduri, Kamesh ; Chakravarthy, Sharma ; Bhowmick, Sanjukta ( August 2023 , Frontiers in Big Data)

   Networks (or graphs) are used to model the dyadic relations between entities in complex systems. Analyzing the properties of the networks reveal important characteristics of the underlying system. However, in many disciplines, including social sciences, bioinformatics, and technological systems, multiple relations exist between entities. In such cases, a simple graph is not sufficient to model these multiple relations, and a multilayer network is a more appropriate model. In this paper, we explore community detection in multilayer networks. Specifically, we propose a novel network decoupling strategy for efficiently combining the communities in the different layers using the Boolean primitives AND, OR, and NOT. Our proposed method, network decoupling, is based on analyzing the communities in each network layer individually and then aggregating the analysis results. We (i) describe our network decoupling algorithms for finding communities, (ii) present how network decoupling can be used to express different types of communities in multilayer networks, and (iii) demonstrate the effectiveness of using network decoupling for detecting communities in real-world and synthetic data sets. Compared to other algorithms for detecting communities in multilayer networks, our proposed network decoupling method requires significantly lower computation time while producing results of high accuracy. Based on these results, we anticipate that our proposed network decoupling technique will enable a more detailed analysis of multilayer networks in an efficient manner. 

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