Size agnostic change point detection framework for evolving networks

Abstract

Changes in the structure of observed social and complex networks can indicate a significant underlying change in an organization, or reflect the response of the network to an external event. Automatic detection of change points in evolving networks is rudimentary to the research and the understanding of the effect of such events on networks. Here we present an easy-to-implement and fast framework for change point detection in evolving temporal networks. Our method is size agnostic, and does not require either prior knowledge about the network's size and structure, nor does it require obtaining historical information or nodal identities over time. We tested it over both synthetic data derived from dynamic models and two real datasets: Enron email exchange and AskUbuntu forum. Our framework succeeds with both precision and recall and outperforms previous solutions.