Lena Mangold | Searcharxiv

arXiv2024

Quantifying metadata relevance to network block structure using description length

Network analysis is often enriched by including an examination of node metadata. In the context of understanding the mesoscale of networks it is often assumed that node groups based on metadata and node groups based on connectivity patterns are intrinsically linked. This assumption is increasingly being challenged, whereby metadata might be entirely unrelated to structure or, similarly, multiple sets of metadata might be relevant to the structure of a network in different ways. We propose the metablox tool to quantify the relationship between a network's node metadata and its mesoscale structure, measuring the strength of the relationship and the type of structural arrangement exhibited by the metadata. We show on a number of synthetic and empirical networks that our tool distinguishes relevant metadata and allows for this in a comparative setting, demonstrating that it can be used as part of systematic meta analyses for the comparison of networks from different domains.

cs.SI↗

arXiv2024

Chronoblox: Chronophotographic Sequential Graph Visualization

We introduce Chronoblox, a system for visualizing dynamic graphs. Chronoblox consists of a chronophotography of a sequence of graph snapshots based on a single embedding space common to all time periods. The goal of Chronoblox is to project all snapshots onto a common visualization space so as to represent both local and global dynamics at a glance. In this short paper, we review both the embedding and spatialization strategies. We then explain the way in which Chronoblox translates micro to meso structural evolution visually. We finally evaluate our approach using a synthetic network before illustrating it on a real world retweet network.

cs.HC↗

arXiv2023

Generative models for two-ground-truth partitions in networks

A myriad of approaches have been proposed to characterise the mesoscale structure of networks - most often as a partition based on patterns variously called communities, blocks, or clusters. Clearly, distinct methods designed to detect different types of patterns may provide a variety of answers to the network's mesoscale structure. Yet, even multiple runs of a given method can sometimes yield diverse and conflicting results, producing entire landscapes of partitions which potentially include multiple (locally optimal) mesoscale explanations of the network. Such ambiguity motivates a closer look at the ability of these methods to find multiple qualitatively different 'ground truth' partitions in a network. Here, we propose the stochastic cross-block model (SCBM), a generative model which allows for two distinct partitions to be built into the mesoscale structure of a single benchmark network. We demonstrate a use case of the benchmark model by appraising the power of stochastic block models (SBMs) to detect implicitly planted coexisting bi-community and core-periphery structures of different strengths. Given our model design and experimental set-up, we find that the ability to detect the two partitions individually varies by SBM variant and that coexistence of both partitions is recovered only in a very limited number of cases. Our findings suggest that in most instances only one - in some way dominating - structure can be detected, even in the presence of other partitions. They underline the need for considering entire landscapes of partitions when different competing explanations exist and motivate future research to advance partition coexistence detection methods. Our model also contributes to the field of benchmark networks more generally by enabling further exploration of the ability of new and existing methods to detect ambiguity in the mesoscale structure of networks.

cs.SI↗