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Computing meaningful clusters of nodes is crucial to analyze large networks. In this paper, we present a pairwise node similarity measure that allows to extract roles, i.e. group of nodes sharing similar flow patterns within a network. We propose a low rank iterative scheme to approximate the similarity measure for very large networks. Finally, we show that our low rank similarity score successfully extracts the different roles in random graphs and that its performances are similar to the pairwise similarity measure., Comment: 7 pages, 2 columns, 4 figures, conference paper for MTNS2014

Communities play a crucial role to describe and analyse modern networks. However, the size of those networks has grown tremendously with the increase of computational power and data storage. While various methods have been developed to extract community structures, their computational cost or the difficulty to parallelize existing algorithms make partitioning real networks into communities a challenging problem. In this paper, we propose to alter an efficient algorithm, the Louvain method, such that communities are defined as the connected components of a tree-like assignment graph. Within this framework, we precisely describe the different steps of our algorithm and demonstrate its highly parallelizable nature. We then show that despite its simplicity, our algorithm has a partitioning quality similar to the original method on benchmark graphs and even outperforms other algorithms. We also show that, even on a single processor, our method is much faster and allows the analysis of very large networks.

Mobile phone datasets allow for the analysis of human behavior on an unprecedented scale. The social network, temporal dynamics and mobile behavior of mobile phone users have often been analyzed independently from each other using mobile phone datasets. In this article, we explore the connections between various features of human behavior extracted from a large mobile phone dataset. Our observations are based on the analysis of communication data of 100000 anonymized and randomly chosen individuals in a dataset of communications in Portugal. We show that clustering and principal component analysis allow for a significant dimension reduction with limited loss of information. The most important features are related to geographical location. In particular, we observe that most people spend most of their time at only a few locations. With the help of clustering methods, we then robustly identify home and office locations and compare the results with official census data. Finally, we analyze the geographic spread of users' frequent locations and show that commuting distances can be reasonably well explained by a gravity model., Comment: 16 pages, 12 figures

We consider the problem of inferring meaningful spatial information in networks from incomplete information on the connection intensity between the nodes of the network. We consider two spatially distributed networks: a population migration flow network within the US, and a network of mobile phone calls between cities in Belgium. For both networks we use the eigenvectors of the Laplacian matrix constructed from the link intensities to obtain informative visualizations and capture natural geographical subdivisions. We observe that some low order eigenvectors localize very well and seem to reveal small geographically cohesive regions that match remarkably well with political and administrative boundaries. We discuss possible explanations for this observation by describing diffusion maps and localized eigenfunctions. In addition, we discuss a possible connection with the weighted graph cut problem, and provide numerical evidence supporting the idea that lower order eigenvectors point out local cuts in the network. However, we do not provide a formal and rigorous justification for our observations., Comment: 15 pages

We consider the problem of approximating a multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) $p\times m$ rational transfer function $H(s)$ of high degree by another $p\times m$ rational transfer function $\hat H(s)$ of much smaller degree, so that the ${\cal H}_2$ norm of the approximation error is minimized. We characterize the stationary points of the ${\cal H}_2$ norm of the approximation error by tangential interpolation conditions and also extend these results to the discrete-time case. We analyze whether it is reasonable to assume that lower-order models can always be approximated arbitrarily closely by imposing only first-order interpolation conditions. Finally, we analyze the ${\cal H}_2$ norm of the approximation error for a simple case in order to illustrate the complexity of the minimization problem., Comment: Paper ID sheet: http://www.inma.ucl.ac.be/~absil/Publi/H2-modred-mimo.htm

In this paper, we analyze statistical properties of a communication network constructed from the records of a mobile phone company. The network consists of 2.5 million customers that have placed 810 millions of communications (phone calls and text messages) over a period of 6 months and for whom we have geographical home localization information. It is shown that the degree distribution in this network has a power-law degree distribution $k^{-5}$ and that the probability that two customers are connected by a link follows a gravity model, i.e. decreases like $d^{-2}$, where $d$ is the distance between the customers. We also consider the geographical extension of communication triangles and we show that communication triangles are not only composed of geographically adjacent nodes but that they may extend over large distances. This last property is not captured by the existing models of geographical networks and in a last section we propose a new model that reproduces the observed property. Our model, which is based on the migration and on the local adaptation of agents, is then studied analytically and the resulting predictions are confirmed by computer simulations., Comment: 17 pages, 8 figures

In this paper, we present several descent methods that can be applied to nonnegative matrix factorization and we analyze a recently developped fast block coordinate method called Rank-one Residue Iteration (RRI). We also give a comparison of these different methods and show that the new block coordinate method has better properties in terms of approximation error and complexity. By interpreting this method as a rank-one approximation of the residue matrix, we prove that it \emph{converges} and also extend it to the nonnegative tensor factorization and introduce some variants of the method by imposing some additional controllable constraints such as: sparsity, discreteness and smoothness., Comment: 47 pages. New convergence proof using damped version of RRI. To appear in Numerical Linear Algebra in Signals, Systems and Control. Accepted. Illustrating Matlab code is included in the source bundle

The paper introduces a novel iterative method that assigns a reputation to n + m items: n raters and m objects. Each rater evaluates a subset of objects leading to a n x m rating matrix with a certain sparsity pattern. From this rating matrix we give a nonlinear formula to define the reputation of raters and objects. We also provide an iterative algorithm that superlinearly converges to the unique vector of reputations and this for any rating matrix. In contrast to classical outliers detection, no evaluation is discarded in this method but each one is taken into account with different weights for the reputation of the objects. The complexity of one iteration step is linear in the number of evaluations, making our algorithm efficient for large data set. Experiments show good robustness of the reputation of the objects against cheaters and spammers and good detection properties of cheaters and spammers., Comment: 10 pages, 11 figures

We analyze linkage strategies for a set I of webpages for which the webmaster wants to maximize the sum of Google's PageRank scores. The webmaster can only choose the hyperlinks starting from the webpages of I and has no control on the hyperlinks from other webpages. We provide an optimal linkage strategy under some reasonable assumptions., Comment: 27 pages, 14 figures, submitted to Linear Algebra Appl

We introduce a concept of similarity between vertices of directed graphs. Let G_A and G_B be two directed graphs. We define a similarity matrix whose (i, j)-th real entry expresses how similar vertex j (in G_A) is to vertex i (in G_B. The similarity matrix can be obtained as the limit of the normalized even iterates of a linear transformation. In the special case where G_A=G_B=G, the matrix is square and the (i, j)-th entry is the similarity score between the vertices i and j of G. We point out that Kleinberg's "hub and authority" method to identify web-pages relevant to a given query can be viewed as a special case of our definition in the case where one of the graphs has two vertices and a unique directed edge between them. In analogy to Kleinberg, we show that our similarity scores are given by the components of a dominant eigenvector of a non-negative matrix. Potential applications of our similarity concept are numerous. We illustrate an application for the automatic extraction of synonyms in a monolingual dictionary.