Network node label acquisition and tracking

Abstract

Complex networks are ubiquitous in real-world and represent a multitude of natural and artificial systems. Some of these networks are inherently dynamic and their structure changes over time, but only recently has the research community been trying to better characterize them. In this paper we propose a novel general methodology to characterize time evolving networks, analyzing the dynamics of their structure by labeling the nodes and tracking how these labels evolve. Node labeling is formulated as a clustering task that assigns a classification to each node according to its local properties. Association rule mining is then applied to sequences of nodes' labels to extract useful rules that best describe changes in the network. We evaluate our method using two different networks, a real-world network of the world annual trades and a synthetic scale-free network, in order to uncover evolution patterns. The results show that our approach is valid and gives insights into the dynamics of the network. As an example, the derived rules for the scale-free network capture the properties of preferential node attachment. © 2011 Springer-Verlag.