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Bipartite graphs are a prevalent modeling tool for real-world networks, capturing interactions between vertices of two different types. Within this framework, bicliques emerge as crucial structures when studying dense subgraphs: they are sets of vertices such that all vertices of the first type interact with all vertices of the second type. Therefore, they allow identifying groups of closely related vertices of the network, such as individuals with similar interests or webpages with similar contents. This article introduces a new algorithm designed for the exhaustive enumeration of maximal bicliques within a bipartite graph. This algorithm, called BBK for Bipartite Bron-Kerbosch, is a new extension to the bipartite case of the Bron-Kerbosch algorithm, which enumerates the maximal cliques in standard (non-bipartite) graphs. It is faster than the state-of-the-art algorithms and allows the enumeration on massive bipartite graphs that are not manageable with existing implementations. We analyze it theoretically to establish two complexity formulas: one as a function of the input and one as a function of the output characteristics of the algorithm. We also provide an open-access implementation of BBK in C++, which we use to experiment and validate its efficiency on massive real-world datasets and show that its execution time is shorter in practice than state-of-the art algorithms. These experiments also show that the order in which the vertices are processed, as well as the choice of one of the two types of vertices on which to initiate the enumeration have an impact on the computation time., Comment: 21 pages, 4 figures, 3 tables

Community detection is a popular approach to understand the organization of interactions in static networks. For that purpose, the Clique Percolation Method (CPM), which involves the percolation of k-cliques, is a well-studied technique that offers several advantages. Besides, studying interactions that occur over time is useful in various contexts, which can be modeled by the link stream formalism. The Dynamic Clique Percolation Method (DCPM) has been proposed for extending CPM to temporal networks. However, existing implementations are unable to handle massive datasets. We present a novel algorithm that adapts CPM to link streams, which has the advantage that it allows us to speed up the computation time with respect to the existing DCPM method. We evaluate it experimentally on real datasets and show that it scales to massive link streams. For example, it allows to obtain a complete set of communities in under twenty-five minutes for a dataset with thirty million links, what the state of the art fails to achieve even after a week of computation. We further show that our method provides communities similar to DCPM, but slightly more aggregated. We exhibit the relevance of the obtained communities in real world cases, and show that they provide information on the importance of vertices in the link streams., Comment: 18 pages, 7 figures, to be published in 30th International Symposium on Temporal Representation and Reasoning (TIME 2023)

Betweenness centrality measure assesses the importance of nodes in a graph and has been used in a variety of contexts. Betweenness centrality has also been extended to temporal graphs. Temporal graphs have edges that bear labels according to the time of the interactions between the nodes. Betweenness centrality has been extended to the temporal graph settings, and the notion of paths has been extended to temporal paths. Recent results by Bu{\ss} et al. and Rymar et al. showed that the betweenness centrality of all nodes in a temporal graph can be computed in O(n^3 T^2) or O(n^2 m T^2 ), where T is the number of time units, m the number of temporal edges and n the number of nodes. In this paper, we improve the running time analysis of these previous approaches to compute the betweenness centrality of all nodes in a temporal graph. We give an algorithm that runs in O(n m T + n^2 T )., Comment: A more comprehensive and complete version of this work can be found at: arXiv:2305.01080

Link streams offer a good model for representing interactions over time. They consist of links $(b,e,u,v)$, where $u$ and $v$ are vertices interacting during the whole time interval $[b,e]$. In this paper, we deal with the problem of enumerating maximal cliques in link streams. A clique is a pair $(C,[t_0,t_1])$, where $C$ is a set of vertices that all interact pairwise during the full interval $[t_0,t_1]$. It is maximal when neither its set of vertices nor its time interval can be increased. Some of the main works solving this problem are based on the famous Bron-Kerbosch algorithm for enumerating maximal cliques in graphs. We take this idea as a starting point to propose a new algorithm which matches the cliques of the instantaneous graphs formed by links existing at a given time $t$ to the maximal cliques of the link stream. We prove its validity and compute its complexity, which is better than the state-of-the art ones in many cases of interest. We also study the output-sensitive complexity, which is close to the output size, thereby showing that our algorithm is efficient. To confirm this, we perform experiments on link streams used in the state of the art, and on massive link streams, up to 100 million links. In all cases our algorithm is faster, mostly by a factor of at least 10 and up to a factor of $10^4$. Moreover, it scales to massive link streams for which the existing algorithms are not able to provide the solution., Comment: 28 pages, 6 figure, 5 tables

Listing triangles is a fundamental graph problem with many applications, and large graphs require fast algorithms. Vertex ordering allows the orientation of edges from lower to higher vertex indices, and state-of-the-art triangle listing algorithms use this to accelerate their execution and to bound their time complexity. Yet, only basic orderings have been tested. In this paper, we show that studying the precise cost of algorithms instead of their bounded complexity leads to faster solutions. We introduce cost functions that link ordering properties with the running time of a given algorithm. We prove that their minimization is NP-hard and propose heuristics to obtain new orderings with different trade-offs between cost reduction and ordering time. Using datasets with up to two billion edges, we show that our heuristics accelerate the listing of triangles by an average of 38% when the ordering is already given as an input, and 16% when the ordering time is included., Comment: 11 pages, 4 figures. Open-source C++ code available at: https://github.com/lecfab/volt

Automatic detection of relevant groups of nodes in large real-world graphs, i.e. community detection, has applications in many fields and has received a lot of attention in the last twenty years. The most popular method designed to find overlapping communities (where a node can belong to several communities) is perhaps the clique percolation method (CPM). This method formalizes the notion of community as a maximal union of $k$-cliques that can be reached from each other through a series of adjacent $k$-cliques, where two cliques are adjacent if and only if they overlap on $k-1$ nodes. Despite much effort CPM has not been scalable to large graphs for medium values of $k$. Recent work has shown that it is possible to efficiently list all $k$-cliques in very large real-world graphs for medium values of $k$. We build on top of this work and scale up CPM. In cases where this first algorithm faces memory limitations, we propose another algorithm, CPMZ, that provides a solution close to the exact one, using more time but less memory., Comment: 15 pages, 5 figures, 1 table

We introduce an original mathematical model to analyse the diffusion of posts within a generic online social platform. The main novelty is that each user is not simply considered as a node on the social graph, but is further equipped with his/her own Wall and Newsfeed, and has his/her own individual self-posting and re-posting activity. As a main result using our developed model, we derive in closed form the probabilities that posts originating from a given user are found on the Wall and Newsfeed of any other. These are the solution of a linear system of equations, which can be resolved iteratively. In fact, our model is very flexible with respect to the modelling assumptions. Using the probabilities derived from the solution, we define a new measure of per-user influence over the entire network, the $\Psi$-score, which combines the user position on the graph with user (re-)posting activity. In the homogeneous case where all users have the same activity rates, it is shown that a variant of the $\Psi$-score is equal to PageRank. Furthermore, we compare the new model and its $\Psi$-score against the empirical influence measured from very large data traces (Twitter, Weibo). The results illustrate that these new tools can accurately rank influencers with asymmetric (re-)posting activity for such real world applications., Comment: 18 pages, 7 figures, journal publications. arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:1902.07187

Betweeness centrality is one of the most important concepts in graph analysis. It was recently extended to link streams, a graph generalization where links arrive over time. However, its computation raises non-trivial issues, due in particular to the fact that time is considered as continuous. We provide here the first algorithms to compute this generalized betweenness centrality, as well as several companion algorithms that have their own interest. They work in polynomial time and space, we illustrate them on typical examples, and we provide an implementation.

Stream graphs model highly dynamic networks in which nodes and/or links arrive and/or leave over time. Strongly connected components in stream graphs were defined recently, but no algorithm was provided to compute them. We present here several solutions with polynomial time and space complexities, each with its own strengths and weaknesses. We provide an implementation and experimentally compare the algorithms in a wide variety of practical cases. In addition, we propose an approximation scheme that significantly reduces computation costs, and gives even more insight on the dataset.

We recently introduced a formalism for the modeling of temporal networks, that we call stream graphs. It emphasizes the streaming nature of data and allows rigorous definitions of many important concepts generalizing classical graphs. This includes in particular size, density, clique, neighborhood, degree, clustering coefficient, and transitivity. In this contribution, we show that, like graphs, stream graphs may be extended to cope with bipartite structures, with node and link weights, or with link directions. We review the main bipartite, weighted or directed graph concepts proposed in the literature, we generalize them to the cases of bipartite, weighted, or directed stream graphs, and we show that obtained concepts are consistent with graph and stream graph ones. This provides a formal ground for an accurate modeling of the many temporal networks that have one or several of these features.

Link streams model interactions over time, and a clique in a link stream is defined as a set of nodes and a time interval such that all pairs of nodes in this set interact permanently during this time interval. This notion was introduced recently in the case where interactions are instantaneous. We generalize it to the case of interactions with durations and show that the instantaneous case actually is a particular case of the case with durations. We propose an algorithm to detect maximal cliques that improves our previous one for instantaneous link streams, and performs better than the state of the art algorithms in several cases of interest.

Studying IP traffic is crucial for many applications. We focus here on the detection of (structurally and temporally) dense sequences of interactions, that may indicate botnets or coordinated network scans. More precisely, we model a MAWI capture of IP traffic as a link streams, i.e. a sequence of interactions $(t_1 , t_2 , u, v)$ meaning that devices $u$ and $v$ exchanged packets from time $t_1$ to time $t_2$ . This traffic is captured on a single router and so has a bipartite structure: links occur only between nodes in two disjoint sets. We design a method for finding interesting bipartite cliques in such link streams, i.e. two sets of nodes and a time interval such that all nodes in the first set are linked to all nodes in the second set throughout the time interval. We then explore the bipartite cliques present in the considered trace. Comparison with the MAWILab classification of anomalous IP addresses shows that the found cliques succeed in detecting anomalous network activity.

Graph theory provides a language for studying the structure of relations, and it is often used to study interactions over time too. However, it poorly captures the both temporal and structural nature of interactions, that calls for a dedicated formalism. In this paper, we generalize graph concepts in order to cope with both aspects in a consistent way. We start with elementary concepts like density, clusters, or paths, and derive from them more advanced concepts like cliques, degrees, clustering coefficients, or connected components. We obtain a language to directly deal with interactions over time, similar to the language provided by graphs to deal with relations. This formalism is self-consistent: usual relations between different concepts are preserved. It is also consistent with graph theory: graph concepts are special cases of the ones we introduce. This makes it easy to generalize higher-level objects such as quotient graphs, line graphs, k-cores, and centralities. This paper also considers discrete versus continuous time assumptions, instantaneous links, and extensions to more complex cases., Comment: Keywords: stream graphs, link streams, temporal networks, time-varying graphs, dynamic graphs, dynamic networks, longitudinal networks, interactions, time, graphs, networks

A link stream is a collection of triplets $(t, u, v)$ indicating that an interaction occurred between u and v at time t. We generalize the classical notion of cliques in graphs to such link streams: for a given $\Delta$, a $\Delta$-clique is a set of nodes and a time interval such that all pairs of nodes in this set interact at least once during each sub-interval of duration $\Delta$. We propose an algorithm to enumerate all maximal (in terms of nodes or time interval) cliques of a link stream, and illustrate its practical relevance on a real-world contact trace.

Peer-to-peer (P2P) systems are widely used to exchange content over the Internet. Knowledge on paedophile activity in such networks remains limited while it has important social consequences. Moreover, though there are different P2P systems in use, previous academic works on this topic focused on one system at a time and their results are not directly comparable. We design a methodology for comparing \kad and \edonkey, two P2P systems among the most prominent ones and with different anonymity levels. We monitor two \edonkey servers and the \kad network during several days and record hundreds of thousands of keyword-based queries. We detect paedophile-related queries with a previously validated tool and we propose, for the first time, a large-scale comparison of paedophile activity in two different P2P systems. We conclude that there are significantly fewer paedophile queries in \kad than in \edonkey (approximately 0.09% \vs 0.25%)., Comment: Submitted

Increasing knowledge of paedophile activity in P2P systems is a crucial societal concern, with important consequences on child protection, policy making, and internet regulation. Because of a lack of traces of P2P exchanges and rigorous analysis methodology, however, current knowledge of this activity remains very limited. We consider here a widely used P2P system, eDonkey, and focus on two key statistics: the fraction of paedophile queries entered in the system and the fraction of users who entered such queries. We collect hundreds of millions of keyword-based queries; we design a paedophile query detection tool for which we establish false positive and false negative rates using assessment by experts; with this tool and these rates, we then estimate the fraction of paedophile queries in our data; finally, we design and apply methods for quantifying users who entered such queries. We conclude that approximately 0.25% of queries are paedophile, and that more than 0.2% of users enter such queries. These statistics are by far the most precise and reliable ever obtained in this domain., Comment: In press Information Processing and Management, 2012

Many works have studied the Internet topology, but few have investigated the question of how it evolves over time. This paper focuses on the Internet routing IP-level topology and proposes a first step towards realistic modeling of its dynamics. We study periodic measurements of routing trees from a single monitor to a fixed destination set and identify invariant properties of its dynamics. We then propose a simple model for the underlying mechanisms of the topology dynamics. Simulations show that it effectively captures the observed behaviors, thus providing key insights of relevant mechanisms governing the Internet routing dynamics., Comment: 12 pages, In submission

Many real-world complex networks are best modeled as bipartite (or 2-mode) graphs, where nodes are divided into two sets with links connecting one side to the other. However, there is currently a lack of methods to analyze properly such graphs as most existing measures and methods are suited to classical graphs. A usual but limited approach consists in deriving 1-mode graphs (called projections) from the underlying bipartite structure, though it causes important loss of information and data storage issues. We introduce here internal links and pairs as a new notion useful for such analysis: it gives insights on the information lost by projecting the bipartite graph. We illustrate the relevance of theses concepts on several real-world instances illustrating how it enables to discriminate behaviors among various cases when we compare them to a benchmark of random networks. Then, we show that we can draw benefit from this concept for both modeling complex networks and storing them in a compact format.

Mesurer avec pr\'ecision la dynamique des graphes de terrain est une t\^ache difficile, car les propri\'et\'es observ\'ees peuvent \^etre biais\'ees pour diff\'erentes raisons, en particulier le fait que la p\'eriode de mesure soit finie. Dans ce papier, nous introduisons une m\'ethodologie g\'en\'erale qui nous permet de savoir si la fen\^etre d'observation est suffisamment longue pour caract\'eriser une propri\'et\'e donn\'ee dans n'importe quel syst\`eme dynamique. Nous appliquons cette m\'ethodologie \`a l'\'etude des dur\'ees de sessions et des dur\'ees de vie des fichiers sur deux jeux de donn\'ees P2P. Nous montrons que le comportement des propri\'et\'es est diff\'erent : pour les dur\'ees de sessions, notre m\'ethodologie nous permet de caract\'eriser avec pr\'ecision la forme de leur distribution. Par contre, pour les dur\'ees de vie des fichiers, nous montrons que cette propri\'et\'e ne peut pas \^etre caract\'eris\'ee, soit parce qu'elle n'est pas stationnaire, soit parce que la dur\'ee de notre mesure est trop courte.

It appeared recently that the underlying degree distribution of networks may play a crucial role concerning their robustness. Empiric and analytic results have been obtained, based on asymptotic and mean-field approximations. Previous work insisted on the fact that power-law degree distributions induce high resilience to random failure but high sensitivity to attack strategies, while Poisson degree distributions are quite sensitive in both cases. Then, much work has been done to extend these results. We aim here at studying in depth these results, their origin, and limitations. We review in detail previous contributions and give full proofs in a unified framework, and identify the approximations on which these results rely. We then present new results aimed at enlightening some important aspects. We also provide extensive rigorous experiments which help evaluate the relevance of the analytic results. We reach the conclusion that, even if the basic results of the field are clearly true and important, they are in practice much less striking than generally thought. The differences between random failures and attacks are not so huge and can be explained with simple facts. Likewise, the differences in the behaviors induced by power-law and Poisson distributions are not as striking as often claimed.

Collecting information about user activity in peer-to-peer systems is a key but challenging task. We describe here a distributed platform for doing so on the eDonkey network, relying on a group of honeypot peers which claim to have certain files and log queries they receive for these files. We then conduct some measurements with typical scenarios and use the obtained data to analyze the impact of key parameters like measurement duration, number of honeypots involved, and number of advertised files. This illustrates both the possible uses of our measurement system, and the kind of data one may collect using it., Comment: Hot-P2P Sixth International Workshop on Hot Topics in Peer-to-Peer Systems (Hot-P2P 2009), May 29, 2009, Rome, Italy

Traceroute is widely used: from the diagnosis of network problems to the assemblage of internet maps. Unfortu- nately, there are a number of problems with traceroute methodology, which lead to the inference of erroneous routes. This paper studies particular structures arising in nearly all traceroute measurements. We characterize them as "loops", "cycles", and "diamonds". We iden- tify load balancing as a possible cause for the appear- ance of false loops, cycles and diamonds, i.e., artifacts that do not represent the internet topology. We pro- vide a new publicly-available traceroute, called Paris traceroute, which, by controlling the packet header con- tents, provides a truer picture of the actual routes that packets follow. We performed measurements, from the perspective of a single source tracing towards multiple destinations, and Paris traceroute allowed us to show that many of the particular structures we observe are indeed traceroute measurement artifacts., Comment: Computer Networks 52-5 (2008), pp. 998-1018. Extended abstract published in the proceedings of the 6-th Internet Measurement Conference IMC'06, 2006, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil

The diameter of a graph is among its most basic parameters. Since a few years, it moreover became a key issue to compute it for massive graphs in the context of complex network analysis. However, known algorithms, including the ones producing approximate values, have too high a time and/or space complexity to be used in such cases. We propose here a new approach relying on very simple and fast algorithms that compute (upper and lower) bounds for the diameter. We show empirically that, on various real-world cases representative of complex networks studied in the literature, the obtained bounds are very tight (and even equal in some cases). This leads to rigorous and very accurate estimations of the actual diameter in cases which were previously untractable in practice., Comment: ACM Journal of Experimental Algorithmics (JEA), 13, 2008

By focusing on what can be observed by running traceroute-like measurements at a high frequency from a single monitor to a fixed destination set, we show that the observed view of the topology is constantly evolving at a pace much higher than expected. Repeated measurements discover new IP addresses at a constant rate, for long period of times (up to several months). In order to provide explanations, we study this phenomenon both at the IP, and at the Autonomous System levels. We show that this renewal of IP addresses is partially caused by a BGP routing dynamics, altering paths between existing ASes. Furthermore, we conjecture that an intra AS routing dynamics is another cause of this phenomenon., Comment: Fourth International Conference on Internet Monitoring and Protection (ICIMP 2009), May 24-28, 2009, Venice, Italy

This paper presents a capture of the queries managed by an eDonkey server during almost 10 weeks, leading to the observation of almost 9 billion messages involving almost 90 million users and more than 275 million distinct files. Acquisition and management of such data raises several challenges, which we discuss as well as the solutions we developed. We obtain a very rich dataset, orders of magnitude larger than previously avalaible ones, which we provide for public use. We finally present basic analysis of the obtained data, which already gives evidence of non-trivial features.

In contrast with most internet topology measurement research, our concern here is not to obtain a map as complete and precise as possible of the whole internet. Instead, we claim that each machine's view of this topology, which we call ego-centered view, is an object worth of study in itself. We design and implement an ego-centered measurement tool, and perform radar-like measurements consisting of repeated measurements of such views of the internet topology. We conduct long-term (several weeks) and high-speed (one round every few minutes) measurements of this kind from more than one hundred monitors, and we provide the obtained data. We also show that these data may be used to detect events in the dynamics of internet topology., Comment: 8 pages

Many real-world complex networks actually have a bipartite nature: their nodes may be separated into two classes, the links being between nodes of different classes only. Despite this, and despite the fact that many ad-hoc tools have been designed for the study of special cases, very few exist to analyse (describe, extract relevant information) such networks in a systematic way. We propose here an extension of the most basic notions used nowadays to analyse classical complex networks to the bipartite case. To achieve this, we introduce a set of simple statistics, which we discuss by comparing their values on a representative set of real-world networks and on their random versions.

Complex networks, modeled as large graphs, received much attention during these last years. However, data on such networks is only available through intricate measurement procedures. Until recently, most studies assumed that these procedures eventually lead to samples large enough to be representative of the whole, at least concerning some key properties. This has crucial impact on network modeling and simulation, which rely on these properties. Recent contributions proved that this approach may be misleading, but no solution has been proposed. We provide here the first practical way to distinguish between cases where it is indeed misleading, and cases where the observed properties may be trusted. It consists in studying how the properties of interest evolve when the sample grows, and in particular whether they reach a steady state or not. In order to illustrate this method and to demonstrate its relevance, we apply it to data-sets on complex network measurements that are representative of the ones commonly used. The obtained results show that the method fulfills its goals very well. We moreover identify some properties which seem easier to evaluate in practice, thus opening interesting perspectives.

In this paper we study three classes of models widely used in physics, computer science and social science: the Chip Firing Game, the Abelian Sandpile Model and the Chip Firing Game on a mutating graph. We study the set of configurations reachable from a given initial configuration, called the configuration space of a model, and try to determine the main properties of such sets. We study the order induced over the configurations by the evolution rule. This makes it possible to compare the power of expression of these models. It is known that the configuration spaces we obtain are lattices, a special kind of partially ordered set. Although the Chip Firing Game on a mutating graph is a generalization of the usual Chip Firing Game, we prove that these models generate exactly the same configuration spaces. We also prove that the class of lattices induced by the Abelian Sandpile Model is strictly included in the class of lattices induced by the Chip Firing Game, but contains the class of distributive lattices, a very well known class., Comment: see also http://www.liafa.jussieu.fr/~magnien

In this note, we show that any distributive lattice is isomorphic to the set of reachable configurations of an Edge Firing Game. Together with the result of James Propp, saying that the set of reachable configurations of any Edge Firing Game is always a distributive lattice, this shows that the two concepts are equivalent., Comment: 4 pages, 2 figures

The Chip Firing Game (CFG) is a discrete dynamical model used in physics, computer science and economics. It is known that the set of configurations reachable from an initial configuration (this set is called the configuration space) can be ordered as a lattice. We first present a structural result about this model, which allows us to introduce some useful tools for describing those lattices. Then we establish that the class of lattices that are the configuration space of a CFG is strictly between the class of distributive lattices and the class of upper locally distributive (or ULD) lattices. Finally we propose an extension of the model, the coloured Chip Firing Game, which generates exactly the class of ULD lattices., Comment: See also http://www.liafa.jussieu.fr/~magnien