arXiv subjects

Xiangnan Feng

Publications and source records attributed to Xiangnan Feng.

16 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

The Changing Global Division of Labor in Software: Emergence and Diffusion of New Programming Skills across IT Hubs

With the rise of new industries, often new jobs emerge. Evolutionary Economic Geography and in particular Industry Life Cycle perspectives predict that these activities first emerge in a limited number of cities to then diffuse to other locations as job descriptions become more standardized. Here, we focus on a particularly important new industry: software development, an activity that is economically important, quickly changing, and has a pronounced spatial concentration in a small number of global IT hubs. We use an online database of over 60 million questions and answers about problems in software development that yields a longitudinal dataset of 237 software skills. By geo-locating 3 million posting users at regular intervals, we link these skills to cities worldwide. We find that, in spite of its digital nature, the software industry exhibits similar spatial regularities as previously observed in more traditional sectors. First, cities diversify into skills that are related to their existing ones. Second, new skills first emerge in cities with large and diversified software sectors, and later diffuse -- mostly unhindered by geographical distance -- to smaller cities specialized in closely related skills. We find suggestive but limited support for a windows of locational opportunity account: although even brand-new skills still emerge first in cities with strong prior specialization in related skills, concentrations of related activities impact less the emergence of new skills than the diffusion of existing ones.

cs.SI↗

arXiv2025

Who is using AI to code? Global diffusion and impact of generative AI

Generative coding tools promise big productivity gains, but uneven uptake could widen skill and income gaps. We train a neural classifier to spot AI-generated Python functions in over 30 million GitHub commits by 170,000 developers, tracking how fast -- and where -- these tools take hold. Today, AI writes an estimated 29% of Python functions in the US, a modest and shrinking lead over other countries. We estimate that quarterly output, measured in online code contributions, has increased by 3.6% because of this. Our evidence suggests that programmers using AI may also more readily expand into new domains of software development. However, experienced programmers capture nearly all of these productivity and exploration gains, widening rather than closing the skill gap.

cs.CY↗

arXiv2025

Using digital traces to analyze software work: skills, careers and programming languages

Recent waves of technological transformation are reshaping work in uncertain and hard-to-predict ways. However, jobs at the forefront of the digitizing economy offer an early glimpse of these changes and leave rich activity traces. We exploit such traces in tens of millions of Question and Answer posts on Stack Overflow for the creation of a fine-grained taxonomy of software skills to analyze human capital in the global software industry. Constructing a software skill space that maps relations among these skills reveals that real-world software jobs demand highly coherent skill sets and that programmers learn through a process of related diversification. The latter process often leads to the acquisition of lower-value skills. However, when programmers use Python they preferentially target higher-value skills, offering a potential explanation for Python's successful rise as a dominant general purpose language.

econ.GN↗

arXiv2023

Efficient Link Prediction in Continuous-Time Dynamic Networks using Optimal Transmission and Metropolis Hastings Sampling

Efficient link prediction in continuous-time dynamic networks is a challenging problem that has attracted much research attention in recent years. A widely used approach to dynamic network link prediction is to extract the local structure of the target link through temporal random walk on the network and learn node features using a coding model. However, this approach often assumes that candidate temporal neighbors follow some certain types of distributions, which may be inappropriate for real-world networks, thereby incurring information loss. To address this limitation, we propose a framework in continuous-time dynamic networks based on Optimal Transmission (OT) and Metropolis Hastings (MH) sampling (COM). Specifically, we use optimal transmission theory to calculate the Wasserstein distance between the current node and the time-valid candidate neighbors to minimize information loss in node information propagation. Additionally, we employ the MH algorithm to obtain higher-order structural relationships in the vicinity of the target link, as it is a Markov Chain Monte Carlo method and can flexibly simulate target distributions with complex patterns. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed method through experiments on eight datasets from different fields.

math.DS↗

arXiv2022

Enhance Ambiguous Community Structure via Multi-strategy Community Related Link Prediction Method with Evolutionary Process

Most real-world networks suffer from incompleteness or incorrectness, which is an inherent attribute to real-world datasets. As a consequence, those downstream machine learning tasks in complex network like community detection methods may yield less satisfactory results, i.e., a proper preprocessing measure is required here. To address this issue, in this paper, we design a new community attribute based link prediction strategy HAP and propose a two-step community enhancement algorithm with automatic evolution process based on HAP. This paper aims at providing a community enhancement measure through adding links to clarify ambiguous community structures. The HAP method takes the neighbourhood uncertainty and Shannon entropy to identify boundary nodes, and establishes links by considering the nodes' community attributes and community size at the same time. The experimental results on twelve real-world datasets with ground truth community indicate that the proposed link prediction method outperforms other baseline methods and the enhancement of community follows the expected evolution process.

cs.SI↗

arXiv2022

TCFimt: Temporal Counterfactual Forecasting from Individual Multiple Treatment Perspective

Determining causal effects of temporal multi-intervention assists decision-making. Restricted by time-varying bias, selection bias, and interactions of multiple interventions, the disentanglement and estimation of multiple treatment effects from individual temporal data is still rare. To tackle these challenges, we propose a comprehensive framework of temporal counterfactual forecasting from an individual multiple treatment perspective (TCFimt). TCFimt constructs adversarial tasks in a seq2seq framework to alleviate selection and time-varying bias and designs a contrastive learning-based block to decouple a mixed treatment effect into separated main treatment effects and causal interactions which further improves estimation accuracy. Through implementing experiments on two real-world datasets from distinct fields, the proposed method shows satisfactory performance in predicting future outcomes with specific treatments and in choosing optimal treatment type and timing than state-of-the-art methods.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2022

The Dynamic Resilience of Urban Labour Networks

Understanding and potentially predicting or even controlling urban labour markets represents a great challenge for workers and policy makers alike. Cities are effective engines of economic growth and prosperity and incubate complex dynamics within their labour market, and the labour markets they support demonstrate considerable diversity. This presents a challenge to policy makers who would like to optimise labour markets to benefit workers, promote economic growth and manage the impact of technological change. While much previous work has studied the economic characteristics of cities as a function of size and examined the exposure of urban economies to automation, this has often been from a static perspective. In this work we examine the structure of city job networks to uncover the diffusive properties. More specifically, we identify the occupations which are most important in promoting the diffusion of beneficial or deleterious properties. We find that these properties vary considerably with city size.

physics.soc-ph↗

arXiv2021

Graphical Representation and Hierarchical Decomposition Mechanism for Vertex-Cover Solution Space

In this paper, solution space organization of minimum vertex-cover problem is deeply investigated using the König-Egérvary (KE) graph and theorem, in which a hierarchical decomposition mechanism named KE-layer structure of general graphs is proposed to reveal the complexity of vertex-cover. An algorithm to verify the KE graph is given by the solution space expression of vertex-cover, and the relation between multi-layer KE graphs and maximal matching is illustrated and proved. Furthermore, a framework to calculate the KE-layer number and approximate the minimal vertex-cover is provided, with different strategies of switching nodes and counting energy. The phase transition phenomenon between different KE-layers are studied with the transition points located, and searching of vertex-cover got by this strategy presents comparable advantage against several other methods. The graphical representation and hierarchical decomposition provide a new perspective to illustrate the intrinsic complexity for large-scale graphs/systems recognition.

cs.SI↗

arXiv2021

Effects of Dynamic-Win-Stay-Lose-Learn model with voluntary participation in social dilemma

In recent years, Win-Stay-Lose-Learn rule has attracted wide attention as an effective strategy updating rule, and voluntary participation is proposed by introducing a third strategy in Prisoner's dilemma game. Some researches show that combining Win-Stay-Lose-Learn rule with voluntary participation could promote cooperation more significantly under moderate temptation values, however, cooperators' survival under high aspiration levels and high temptation values is still a challenging problem. In this paper, inspired by Achievement Motivation Theory, a Dynamic-Win-Stay-Lose-Learn rule with voluntary participation is investigated, where a dynamic aspiration process is introduced to describe the co-evolution of individuals' strategies and aspirations. It is found that cooperation is extremely promoted and defection is almost extinct in our model, even when the initial aspiration levels and temptation values are high. The combination of dynamic aspiration and voluntary participation plays an active role since loners could survive under high initial aspiration levels and they will expand stably because of their fixed payoffs. The robustness of our model is also discussed and some adverse structures are found which should be alerted in the evolutionary process. Our work provides a more realistic model and shows that cooperators may prevail defectors in an unfavorable initial environment.

cs.GT↗

arXiv2021

Graph Classification Based on Skeleton and Component Features

Most existing popular methods for learning graph embedding only consider fixed-order global structural features and lack structures hierarchical representation. To address this weakness, we propose a novel graph embedding algorithm named GraphCSC that realizes classification based on skeleton information using fixed-order structures learned in anonymous random walks manner, and component information using different size subgraphs. Two graphs are similar if their skeletons and components are both similar, thus in our model, we integrate both of them together into embeddings as graph homogeneity characterization. We demonstrate our model on different datasets in comparison with a comprehensive list of up-to-date state-of-the-art baselines, and experiments show that our work is superior in real-world graph classification tasks.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2021

Representation Learning of Reconstructed Graphs Using Random Walk Graph Convolutional Network

Graphs are often used to organize data because of their simple topological structure, and therefore play a key role in machine learning. And it turns out that the low-dimensional embedded representation obtained by graph representation learning are extremely useful in various typical tasks, such as node classification, content recommendation and link prediction. However, the existing methods mostly start from the microstructure (i.e., the edges) in the graph, ignoring the mesoscopic structure (high-order local structure). Here, we propose wGCN -- a novel framework that utilizes random walk to obtain the node-specific mesoscopic structures of the graph, and utilizes these mesoscopic structures to reconstruct the graph And organize the characteristic information of the nodes. Our method can effectively generate node embeddings for previously unseen data, which has been proven in a series of experiments conducted on citation networks and social networks (our method has advantages over baseline methods). We believe that combining high-order local structural information can more efficiently explore the potential of the network, which will greatly improve the learning efficiency of graph neural network and promote the establishment of new learning models.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2020

Dynamic aspiration based on Win-Stay-Lose-Learn rule in Spatial Prisoner's Dilemma Gam

Prisoner's dilemma game is the most commonly used model of spatial evolutionary game which is considered as a paradigm to portray competition among selfish individuals. In recent years, Win-Stay-Lose-Learn, a strategy updating rule base on aspiration, has been proved to be an effective model to promote cooperation in spatial prisoner's dilemma game, which leads aspiration to receive lots of attention. But in many research the assumption that individual's aspiration is fixed is inconsistent with recent results from psychology. In this paper, according to Expected Value Theory and Achievement Motivation Theory, we propose a dynamic aspiration model based on Win-Stay-Lose-Learn rule in which individual's aspiration is inspired by its payoff. It is found that dynamic aspiration has a significant impact on the evolution process, and different initial aspirations lead to different results, which are called Stable Coexistence under Low Aspiration, Dependent Coexistence under Moderate aspiration and Defection Explosion under High Aspiration respectively. Furthermore, a deep analysis is performed on the local structures which cause cooperator's existence or defector's expansion, and the evolution process for different parameters including strategy and aspiration. As a result, the intrinsic structures leading to defectors' expansion and cooperators' survival are achieved for different evolution process, which provides a penetrating understanding of the evolution. Compared to fixed aspiration model, dynamic aspiration introduces a more satisfactory explanation on population evolution laws and can promote deeper comprehension for the principle of prisoner's dilemma.

physics.soc-ph↗

arXiv2020

Representation Learning of Graphs Using Graph Convolutional Multilayer Networks Based on Motifs

The graph structure is a commonly used data storage mode, and it turns out that the low-dimensional embedded representation of nodes in the graph is extremely useful in various typical tasks, such as node classification, link prediction , etc. However, most of the existing approaches start from the binary relationship (i.e., edges) in the graph and have not leveraged the higher order local structure (i.e., motifs) of the graph. Here, we propose mGCMN -- a novel framework which utilizes node feature information and the higher order local structure of the graph to effectively generate node embeddings for previously unseen data. Through research we have found that different types of networks have different key motifs. And the advantages of our method over the baseline methods have been demonstrated in a large number of experiments on citation network and social network datasets. At the same time, a positive correlation between increase of the classification accuracy and the clustering coefficient is revealed. It is believed that using high order structural information can truly manifest the potential of the network, which will greatly improve the learning efficiency of the graph neural network and promote a brand-new learning mode establishment.

cs.SI↗

arXiv2018

Core Influence Mechanism on Vertex-Cover Problem through Leaf-Removal-Core Breaking

Leaf-Removal process has been widely researched and applied in many mathematical and physical fields to help understand the complex systems, and a lot of problems including the minimal vertex-cover are deeply related to this process and the Leaf-Removal cores. In this paper, based on the structural features of the Leaf-Removal cores, a method named Core Influence is proposed to break the graphs into No-Leaf-Removal-Core ones, which takes advantages of identifying some significant nodes by localized and greedy strategy. By decomposing the minimal vertex-cover problem into the Leaf-Removal cores breaking process and maximal matching of the remained graphs, it is proved that any minimal vertex-covers of the whole graph can be located into these two processes, of which the latter one is a P problem, and the best boundary is achieved at the transition point. Compared with other node importance indices, the Core Influence method could break down the Leaf-Removal cores much faster and get the no-core graphs by removing fewer nodes from the graphs. Also, the vertex-cover numbers resulted from this method are lower than existing node importance measurements, and compared with the exact minimal vertex-cover numbers, this method performs appropriate accuracy and stability at different scales. This research provides a new localized greedy strategy to break the hard Leaf-Removal Cores efficiently and heuristic methods could be constructed to help understand some NP problems.

cs.SI↗

arXiv2018

Exploring the Node Importance Based on von Neumann Entropy

When analyzing the statistical and topological characteristics of complex networks, an effective and convenient way is to compute the centralities for recognizing influential and significant nodes or structures, yet most of them are restricted to local environment or some specific configurations. In this paper we propose a new centrality for nodes based on the von Neumann entropy, which allows us to investigate the importance of nodes in the view of spectrum eigenvalues distribution. By presenting the performances of this centrality with network examples in reality, it is shown that the von Neumann entropy node centrality is an excellent index for selecting crucial nodes as well as classical ones. Then to lower down the computational complexity, an approximation calculation to this centrality is given which only depends on its first and second neighbors. Furthermore, in the optimal spreader problem and reducing average clustering coefficients, this entropy centrality presents excellent efficiency and unveil topological structure features of networks accurately. The entropy centrality could reduce the scales of giant connected components fastly in Erdos-Renyi and scale-free networks, and break down the cluster structures efficiently in random geometric graphs. This new methodology reveals the node importance in the perspective of spectrum, which provides a new insight into networks research and performs great potentials to discover essential structural features in networks.

cs.SI↗

arXiv2017

Optimal Stabilization of Boolean Networks through Collective Influence

The stability of Boolean networks has attracted much attention due to its wide applications in describing the dynamics of biological systems. During the past decades, much effort has been invested in unveiling how network structure and update rules will affect the stability of Boolean networks. In this paper, we aim to identify and control a minimal set of influential nodes that is capable of stabilizing an unstable Boolean network. By minimizing the largest eigenvalue of a modified non-backtracking matrix, we propose a method using the collective influence theory to identify the influential nodes in Boolean networks with high computational efficiency. We test the performance of collective influence on four different networks. Results show that the collective influence algorithm can stabilize each network with a smaller set of nodes than other heuristic algorithms. Our work provides a new insight into the mechanism that determines the stability of Boolean networks, which may find applications in identifying the virulence genes that lead to serious disease.

physics.soc-ph↗