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Network modeling has been explored extensively by means of theoretical analysis as well as numerical simulations for Network Reconstruction (NR). The network reconstruction problem requires the estimation of the power-law exponent (γ) of a given input network. Thus, the effectiveness of the NR solution depends on the accuracy of the calculation of γ. In this article, we re-examine the degree distribution-based estimation of γ, which is not very accurate due to approximations. We propose X-distribution, which is more accurate than degree distribution. Various state-of-the-art network models, including CPM, NRM, RefOrCite2, BA, CDPAM, and DMS, are considered for simulation purposes, and simulated results support the proposed claim. Further, we apply X-distribution over several real-world networks to calculate their power-law exponents, which differ from those calculated using respective degree distributions. It is observed that X-distributions exhibit more linearity (straight line) on the log-log scale than degree distributions. Thus, X-distribution is more suitable for the evaluation of power-law exponent using linear fitting (on the log-log scale). The MATLAB implementation of power-law exponent (γ) calculation using X-distribution for different network models and the real-world datasets used in our experiments are available at https://github.com/Aikta-Arya/X-distribution-Retraceable-Power-Law-Exponent-of-Complex-Networks.git. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this era of information and communication technology, a large population relies on the Internet to gather information. One of the most popular information sources on the Internet is Wikipedia. Wikipedia is a free encyclopedia that provides a wide range of information to its users. However, there have been concerns about the readability of information on Wikipedia time and again. The readability of the text is defined as the ease of understanding the underlying text. Past studies have analyzed the readability of Wikipedia articles with the help of conventional readability metrics, such as the Flesch-Kincaid readability score and the Automatic Readability Index (ARI). Such metrics only consider the surface-level parameters, such as the number of words, sentences, and paragraphs in the text, to quantify the readability. However, the readability of the text must also take into account the quality of the text. In this study, we consider many new NLP-based parameters capturing the quality of the text, such as lexical diversity, semantic diversity, lexical complexity, and semantic complexity and analyze their impact on the readability of Wikipedia articles using artificial neural networks. Besides NLP parameters, the crowdsourced parameters also affect the readability, and therefore, we also analyze the impact of crowdsourced parameters and observe that the crowdsourced parameters not only influence the readability scores but also affect the NLP parameters of the text. Additionally, we investigate the mediating effect of NLP parameters that connect the crowdsourced parameters to the readability of the text. The results show that the impact of crowdsourced parameters on readability is partially due to the profound effect of NLP-based parameters. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Given the adverse impact of fake news propagation on Social media, fake news mitigation has been one of the main research directions. However, existing approaches neglect fairness towards each community while minimizing the adverse impact of fake news propagation. This results in the exclusion of some minor and underrepresented communities from the benefits of the intervention, which can have important societal repercussions. This research proposes a fairness-aware truth-campaigning method, called FWRRS (Fairness-aware Weighted Reversible Reachable System), which focuses on blocking the influence propagation of a competing entity, in this case, with the use case of fake news mitigation. The proposed method employs weighted reversible reachable trees and maximin fairness to achieve its goals. Experimental analysis shows that FWRRS outperforms fairness-oblivious and fairness-aware methods in terms of both total outreach and fairness. The results show that in the proposed approach, such fairness does not come at a cost in efficiency, and in fact, in most cases, it works as a catalyst for achieving better effectiveness in the future. In real-world networks, we observe up to ∼ 10% improvement in the saved nodes and ∼ 57% improvement in maximin fairness as compared to the second best-performing baseline, which varies for each network. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Online Social networks have become an easy means of communication for users to share their opinion on various topics, including breaking news, public events, and products. The content posted by a user can influence or affect other users, and the users who could influence or affect a high number of users are called influential users. Identifying such influential users has a wide range of applications in the field of marketing, including product advertisement, recommendation, and brand evaluation. However, the users' influence varies in different topics, and hence a tremendous interest has been shown towards identifying topic-based influential users over the past few years. Topic-level information in the content posted by the users can be used in various stages of the topic-based influential user detection (IUD) problem, including data gathering, construction of influence network, quantifying the influence between two users, and analyzing the impact of the detected influential user. This has opened up a wide range of opportunities to utilize the existing techniques to model and analyze the topic-level influence in online social networks. In this paper, we perform a comprehensive study of existing techniques used to infer the topic-based influential users in online social networks. We present a detailed review of these approaches in a taxonomy while highlighting the challenges and limitations associated with each technique. Moreover, we perform a detailed study of different evaluation techniques used in the literature to overcome the challenges that arise in evaluating topic-based IUD approaches. Furthermore, closely related research topics and open research questions in topic-based IUD are discussed to provide a deep understanding of the literature and future directions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The evolution of online social networks is highly dependent on the recommended links. Most of the existing works focus on predicting intra-community links efficiently. However, it is equally important to predict inter-community links with high accuracy for diversifying a network. In this work, we propose a link prediction method, called HM-EIICT, that considers both the similarity of nodes and their community information to predict both kinds of links, intra-community links as well as inter-community links, with higher accuracy. The proposed framework is built on the concept that the connection likelihood between two given nodes differs for inter-community and intra-community node-pairs. The performance of the proposed methods is evaluated using link prediction accuracy and network modularity reduction. The results are studied on real-world networks and show the effectiveness of the proposed method as compared to the baselines. The experiments suggest that the inter-community links can be predicted with a higher accuracy using community information extracted from the network topology, and the proposed framework outperforms several measures especially proposed for community-based link prediction. The paper is concluded with open research directions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In real-world complex networks, understanding the dynamics of their evolution has been of great interest to the scientific community. Predicting non-existent but probable links is an essential task of social network analysis as the addition or removal of the links over time leads to the network evolution. In a network, links can be categorized as intra-community links if both end nodes of the link belong to the same community, otherwise inter-community links. The existing link-prediction methods have mainly focused on achieving high accuracy for intra-community link prediction. In this work, we propose a network embedding method, called NodeSim, which captures both similarities between the nodes and the community structure while learning the low-dimensional representation of the network. The embedding is learned using the proposed NodeSim random walk, which efficiently explores the diverse neighborhood while keeping the more similar nodes closer in the context of the node. We verify the efficacy of the proposed embedding method over state-of-the-art methods using diverse link prediction. We propose a machine learning model for link prediction that considers both the nodes' embedding and their community information to predict the link between two given nodes. Extensive experimental results on several real-world networks demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method for both inter and intra-community link prediction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Centrality measures capture the intuitive notion of the importance of a node in a network. Importance of a node can be a very subjective term and is defined based on the context and the application. Closeness centrality is one of the most popular centrality measures which quantifies how close a node is to every other node in the network. It considers the average distance of a given node to all the other nodes in a network and requires one to know the complete information of the network. To compute the closeness rank of a node, we first need to compute the closeness value of all the nodes, and then compare them to get the rank of the node. In this work, we address the problem of estimating the closeness centrality rank of a node without computing the closeness centrality values of all the nodes in the network. We provide linear time heuristic algorithms which run in O(m), versus the classical algorithm which runs in time O(m·n), where m is the number of edges and n is the number of nodes in the network. The proposed methods are applied to real-world networks, and their accuracy is measured using absolute and weighted error functions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The diffusion of an idea significantly differs from the diffusion of a disease because of the interplay of the complex sociological and behavioral factors in the former. Hence, the conventional epidemiological models fail to capture the heterogeneity of social networks and the complexity of information diffusion. Standard information diffusion models depend heavily on the micro-level parameters of the network like edge weights and implicit vulnerabilities of nodes towards information. Such parameters are rarely available because of the absence of large amounts of information diffusion data. Hence, modeling information diffusion remains a challenging research problem. In this paper, we utilize the peculiar structure of the real-world social networks to derive useful insights into the micro-level parameters. We propose an artificial framework mimicking the real-world information diffusion. The framework includes (1) a synthetic network which structurally resembles a real-world social network and (2) a meme spreading model based on the penta-level classification of edges in the network. The experimental results prove that the synthetic network combined with the proposed spreading model is able to simulate a real-world meme diffusion. The framework is validated with the help of the diffusion data of the Higgs boson meme on Twitter and the datasets of several popular real-world social networks. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Identifying top-ranked nodes can be performed using different centrality measures, based on their characteristics and influential power. The most basic of all the ranking techniques is based on nodes degree. While finding the degree of a node requires local information, ranking the node based on its degree requires global information, namely the degrees of all the nodes of the network. It is infeasible to collect the global information for some graphs such as (i) the ones emerging from big data, (ii) dynamic networks, and (iii) distributed networks in which the whole graph is not known. In this work, we propose methods to estimate the degree rank of a node, that are faster than the classical method of computing the centrality value of all nodes and then rank a node. The proposed methods are modeled based on the network characteristics and sampling techniques, thus not requiring the entire network. We show that approximately 1% node samples are adequate to find the rank of a node with high accuracy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]