Quantifying the impact of information aggregation on complex networks: A temporal perspective

Abstract

Complex networks are a popular and frequent tool for modeling a variety of entities and their relationships. Understanding these relationships and selecting which data will be used in their analysis is key to a proper characterization. Most of the current approaches consider all available information for analysis, aggregating it over time. In this work, we studied the impact of such aggregation while characterizing complex networks. We model four real complex networks using an extended graph model that enables us to quantify the impact of the information aggregation over time. We conclude that data aggregation may distort the characteristics of the underlying real-world network and must be performed carefully. © 2009 Springer Berlin Heidelberg.