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Zhiming Zheng

Publications and source records attributed to Zhiming Zheng.

At least 73 records · Page 4Linked to original sources

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↗

Modeling confirmation bias and peer pressure in opinion dynamics

Confirmation bias and peer pressure both have substantial impacts on the formation of collective decisions. Nevertheless, few attempts have been made to study how the interplay between these two mechanisms affects public opinion evolution. Here we propose an agent-based model of opinion dynamics which incorporates the conjugate effect of confirmation bias (characterized by the population identity scope and individual stubbornness) and peer pressure (described by a susceptibility threshold). We show that the number of opinion fragments first increases and then decreases to one as population identity scope becomes larger in a homogeneous population. Further, in heterogeneous situations, we find that even a small fraction of impressionable individuals who are sensitive to peer pressure could help eliminate public polarization when population identity scope is relatively large. Intriguingly, we highlight the emergence of 'impressionable moderates' who are easily influenced, hold wavering opinions, and are of vital significance in competitive campaigns.

physics.soc-ph↗

Community Detection through Vector-label Propagation Algorithms

Community detection is a fundamental and important problem in network science, as community structures often reveal both topological and functional relationships between different components of the complex system. In this paper, we first propose a gradient descent framework of modularity optimization called vector-label propagation algorithm (VLPA), where a node is associated with a vector of continuous community labels instead of one label. Retaining weak structural information in vector-label, VLPA outperforms some well-known community detection methods, and particularly improves the performance in networks with weak community structures. Further, we incorporate stochastic gradient strategies into VLPA to avoid stuck in the local optima, leading to the stochastic vector-label propagation algorithm (sVLPA). We show that sVLPA performs better than Louvain Method, a widely used community detection algorithm, on both artificial benchmarks and real-world networks. Our theoretical scheme based on vector-label propagation can be directly applied to high-dimensional networks where each node has multiple features, and can also be used for optimizing other partition measures such as modularity with resolution parameters.

physics.soc-ph↗

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↗

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↗

Community detection based on first passage probabilities

Community detection is of fundamental significance for understanding the topology characters and the spreading dynamics on complex networks. While random walk is widely used and is proven effective in many community detection algorithms, there still exists two major defects: (i) the maximal length of random walk is too large to distinguish the clustering information if using the average step of all possible random walks; (ii) the useful community information at all other step lengths are missed if using a pre-assigned maximal length. In this paper, we propose a novel community detection method based on the first passage probabilities (FPPM), equipped with a new similarity measure that incorporates the complete structural information within the maximal step length. Here the diameter of the network is chosen as an appropriate boundary of random walks which is adaptive to different networks. Then we use the hierarchical clustering to group the vertices into communities and further select the best division through the corresponding modularity values. Finally, a post-processing strategy is designed to integrate the unreasonable small communities, which significantly improves the accuracy of community division. Surprisingly, the numerical simulations show that FPPM performs best compared to several classic algorithms on both synthetic benchmarks and real-world networks, which reveals the universality and effectiveness of our method.

physics.soc-ph↗

Public discourse and social network echo chambers driven by socio-cognitive biases

In recent years, social media has increasingly become an important platform for political campaigns, especially elections. It remains elusive how exactly public discourse is driven by the intricate interplay between individual socio-cognitive biases, dueling campaign efforts, and social media platforms. We examine this complex socio-political process by integrating observed retweet networks from the 2016 political networks with an agent-based model of political opinion formation and network structure. Here we show that the range of political viewpoints individuals are willing to consider is a key determinant in the formation of polarized networks and the emergence of echo chambers. We also find that winning majority support in public discourse is determined by both the effort exerted by campaigns and the relative ideological positioning of opposing campaigns. Our results demonstrate how public discourse and political polarization can be modeled as an interactive process of shifting individual opinions, evolving social networks, and political campaigns.

physics.soc-ph↗

Homophily on social networks changes evolutionary advantage in competitive information diffusion

Competitive information diffusion on large-scale social networks reveals fundamental characteristics of rumor contagions and has profound influence on public opinion formation. There has been growing interest in exploring dynamical mechanisms of the competing evolutions recently. Nevertheless, the impacts of population homophily, which determines powerful collective human behaviors, remains unclear. In this paper, we incorporate homophily effects into a modified competitive ignorant-spreader-ignorant (SIS) rumor diffusion model with generalized population preference. Using microscopic Markov chain approach, we first derive the phase diagram of competing diffusion results and examine how competitive information spreads and evolves on social networks. We then explore the detailed effects of homophily, which is modeled by a rewiring mechanism. Results show that homophily promotes the formation of divided "echo chambers" and protects the disadvantaged information from extinction, which further changes or even reverses the evolutionary advantage, i.e., the difference of final proportions of the competitive information. We highlight the conclusion that the reversals may happen only when the initially disadvantaged information has stronger transmission ability, owning diffusion advantage over the other one. Our framework provides profound insight into competing dynamics with population homophily, which may pave ways for further controlling misinformation and guiding public belief systems. Moreover, the reversing condition sheds light on designing effective competing strategies in many real scenarios.

physics.soc-ph↗

Discriminative Embedding Autoencoder with a Regressor Feedback for Zero-Shot Learning

Zero-shot learning (ZSL) aims to recognize the novel object categories using the semantic representation of categories, and the key idea is to explore the knowledge of how the novel class is semantically related to the familiar classes. Some typical models are to learn the proper embedding between the image feature space and the semantic space, whilst it is important to learn discriminative features and comprise the coarse-to-fine image feature and semantic information. In this paper, we propose a discriminative embedding autoencoder with a regressor feedback model for ZSL. The encoder learns a mapping from the image feature space to the discriminative embedding space, which regulates both inter-class and intra-class distances between the learned features by a margin, making the learned features be discriminative for object recognition. The regressor feedback learns to map the reconstructed samples back to the the discriminative embedding and the semantic embedding, assisting the decoder to improve the quality of the samples and provide a generalization to the unseen classes. The proposed model is validated extensively on four benchmark datasets: SUN, CUB, AWA1, AWA2, the experiment results show that our proposed model outperforms the state-of-the-art models, and especially in the generalized zero-shot learning (GZSL), significant improvements are achieved.

cs.CV↗

Steering Eco-Evolutionary Games Dynamics with Manifold Control

Feedback loops between population dynamics of individuals and their ecological environment are ubiquitously found in nature, and have shown profound effects on the resulting eco-evolutionary dynamics. Incorporating linear environmental feedback law into replicator dynamics of two-player games, recent theoretical studies shed light on understanding the oscillating dynamics of social dilemma. However, detailed effects of more general nonlinear feedback loops in multi-player games, which is more common especially in microbial systems, remain unclear. Here, we focus on ecological public goods games with environmental feedbacks driven by nonlinear selection gradient. Unlike previous models, multiple segments of stable and unstable equilibrium manifolds can emerge from the population dynamical systems. We find that a larger relative asymmetrical feedback speed for group interactions centered on cooperators not only accelerates the convergence of stable manifolds, but also increases the attraction basin of these stable manifolds. Furthermore, our work offers an innovative manifold control approach: by designing appropriate switching control laws, we are able to steer the eco-evolutionary dynamics to any desired population states. Our mathematical framework is an important generalization and complement to coevolutionary game dynamics, and also fills the theoretical gap in guiding the widespread problem of population state control in microbial experiments.

physics.soc-ph↗

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↗

Infectivity Enhances Prediction of Viral Cascades in Twitter

Models of contagion dynamics, originally developed for infectious diseases, have proven relevant to the study of information, news, and political opinions in online social systems. Modelling diffusion processes and predicting viral information cascades are important problems in network science. Yet, many studies of information cascades neglect the variation in infectivity across different pieces of information. Here, we employ early-time observations of online cascades to estimate the infectivity of distinct pieces of information. Using simulations and data from real-world Twitter retweets, we demonstrate that these estimated infectivities can be used to improve predictions about the virality of an information cascade. Developing our simulations to mimic the real-world data, we consider the effect of the limited effective time for transmission of a cascade and demonstrate that a simple model for slow but non-negligible decay of the infectivity captures the essential properties of retweet distributions. These results demonstrate the interplay between the intrinsic infectivity of a tweet and the complex network environment within which it diffuses, strongly influencing the likelihood of becoming a viral cascade.

physics.soc-ph↗

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↗

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↗

Levy random walks on multiplex networks

Random walks constitute a fundamental mechanism for many dynamics taking place on complex networks. Besides, as a more realistic description of our society, multiplex networks have been receiving a growing interest, as well as the dynamical processes that occur on top of them. Here, inspired by one specific model of random walks that seems to be ubiquitous across many scientific fields, the Levy flight, we study a new navigation strategy on top of multiplex networks. Capitalizing on spectral graph and stochastic matrix theories, we derive analytical expressions for the mean first passage time and the average time to reach a node on these networks. Moreover, we also explore the efficiency of Levy random walks, which we found to be very different as compared to the single layer scenario, accounting for the structure and dynamics inherent to the multiplex network. Finally, by comparing with some other important random walk processes defined on multiplex networks, we find that in some region of the parameters, a Levy random walk is the most efficient strategy. Our results give us a deeper understanding of Levy random walks and show the importance of considering the topological structure of multiplex networks when trying to find efficient navigation strategies.

physics.soc-ph↗

Contagion processes on the static and activity driven coupling networks

The evolution of network structure and the spreading of epidemic are common coexistent dynamical processes. In most cases, network structure is treated either static or time-varying, supposing the whole network is observed in a same time window. In this paper, we consider the epidemic spreading on a network consisting of both static and time-varying structures. At meanwhile, the time-varying part and the epidemic spreading are supposed to be of the same time scale. We introduce a static and activity driven coupling (SADC) network model to characterize the coupling between static (strong) structure and dynamic (weak) structure. Epidemic thresholds of SIS and SIR model are studied on SADC both analytically and numerically with various coupling strategies, where the strong structure is of homogeneous or heterogeneous degree distribution. Theoretical thresholds obtained from SADC model can both recover and generalize the classical results in static and time-varying networks. It is demonstrated that weak structures can make the epidemics break out much more easily in homogeneous coupling but harder in heterogeneous coupling when keeping same average degree in SADC networks. Furthermore, we show there exists a threshold ratio of the weak structure to have substantive effects on the breakout of the epidemics. This promotes our understanding of why epidemics can still break out in some social networks even we restrict the flow of the population.

physics.soc-ph↗

Research on Solution Space of Bipartite Graph Vertex-Cover by Maximum Matchings

Some rigorous results and statistics of the solution space of Vertex-Covers on bipartite graphs are given in this paper. Based on the $K\ddot{o}nig$'s theorem, an exact solution space expression algorithm is proposed and statistical analysis of the nodes' states is provided. The statistical results fit well with the algorithmic results until the emergence of the unfrozen core, which makes the fluctuation of statistical quantities and causes the replica symmetric breaking in the solutions. Besides, the entropy of bipartite Vertex-Cover solutions is calculated with the clustering entropy using a cycle simplification technique for the unfrozen core. Furthermore, as generalization of bipartite graphs, bipartite core graph is proposed, the solution space of which can also be easily determined; and based on these results, how to generate a $K\ddot{o}nig-Egerv\acute{a}ry$ subgraph is studied by a growth process of adding edges. The investigation of solution space of bipartite graph Vertex-Cover provides intensive understanding and some insights on the solution space complexity, and will produce benefit for finding maximal $K\ddot{o}nig-Egerv\acute{a}ry$ subgraphs, solving general graph Vertex-Cover and recognizing the intrinsic hardness of NP-complete problems.

cs.DS↗

Identification of highly susceptible individuals in complex networks

Identifying highly susceptible individuals in spreading processes is of great significance in controlling outbreaks. In this paper, we explore the susceptibility of people in susceptible-infectious-recovered (SIR) and rumor spreading dynamics. We first study the impact of community structure on people's susceptibility. Despite that the community structure can reduce the infected population given same infection rates, it will not deterministically affect nodes' susceptibility. We find the susceptibility of individuals is sensitive to the choice of spreading dynamics. For SIR spreading, since the susceptibility is highly correlated to nodes' influence, the topological indicator k-shell can better identify highly susceptible individuals, outperforming degree, betweenness centrality and PageRank. In contrast, in rumor spreading model, where nodes' susceptibility and influence have no clear correlation, degree performs the best among considered topological measures. Our finding highlights the significance of both topological features and spreading mechanisms in identifying highly susceptible population.

physics.soc-ph↗