An incremental method to detect communities in dynamic evolving social networks

Identifying influential nodes in social networks from the perspective of attack-defense game

Influence spread analysis, a critical component of social network studies, focuses on the patterns and effects of information dissemination among interconnected entities. The core of influence spread analysis is to identify influential nodes that involve two distinct aspects: influence maximization (IM) and influence blocking maximization (IBM). However, when IM and IBM occur simultaneously, identifying influential nodes becomes an intricate decision-making challenge. This study addresses identifying influential nodes in social networks through an attack-defense game perspective, where an attacker maximizes influence and a defender minimizes it. We first develop a two-player static zero-sum game model considering resource constraints. Based on the equilibrium strategy of this game, we redefine the concept of influential nodes from various viewpoints. Extensive experiments on synthetic and real-world networks show that, in most cases, the defender preferentially defends critical nodes, while the attacker adopts the decentralized strategy. Only when resources are unevenly matched do both players tend to adopt centralized strategies. This study expands the connotation of influential nodes and provides a novel paradigm for the social network analysis with significant potential applications.

An employee retention model using organizational network analysis for voluntary turnover

Contemporary research of employee social network analysis has grown far beyond the conventional wisdom of network and turnover theory; however, what is missing is a comprehensive review highlighting new perspectives and network constructs from a retention viewpoint. Since turnover is a concurrent component of retention, the analysis of the factors of quit propensity can result in a pre-emptive strategy for retention. This paper aims to capture the current state of the field and proposes a conceptual model for retention by exploring network position, centrality measures, network type, and the snowball effect. We identified 30 papers exploring voluntary turnover in social network constructs. Findings show that central network position is not always associated with negative turnover. Eigenvector, structural holes, and K-shell also prove to be a strong predictor of turnover. The snowball turnover of employees in similar network positions is pronounced in scenarios where employee sentiment is negative with poor group efficacy, entrepreneurship, and group values. This paper focuses on several themes to coalesce different determinants of an organizational network to demonstrate how social network theory has evolved to predict employee turnover. The resulting conceptual model suggests how to identify star performers and propose retention strategies.

An approach to prevent weight manipulation by minimum adjustment and maximum entropy method in social network group decision making

In social network group decision making (SN-GDM) problem, subgroup weights are mostly unknown, many approaches have been proposed to determine the subgroup weights. However, most of these methods ignore the weight manipulation behavior of subgroups. Some studies indicated that weight manipulation behavior hinders consensus efficiency. To deal with this issue, this paper proposes a theoretical framework to prevent weight manipulation in SN-GDM. Firstly, a community detection based method is used to cluster the large group. The power relations of subgroups are measured by the power index (PI), which depends on the subgroups size and cohesion. Then, a minimum adjustment feedback model with maximum entropy is proposed to prevent subgroups' manipulation behavior. The minimum adjustment rule aims for 'efficiency' while the maximum entropy rule aims for 'justice'. The experimental results show that the proposed model can guarantee the rationality of weight distribution to reach consensus efficiently, which is achieved by maintaining a balance between 'efficiency' and 'justice' in the mechanism of assigning weights. Finally, the detailed numerical and simulation analyses are carried out to verify the validity of the proposed method.

Dynamic Community Detection Decouples Multiple Time Scale Behavior of Complex Chemical Systems

Although community or cluster identification is becoming a standard tool within the simulation community, traditional algorithms are challenging to adapt to time-dependent data. Here, we introduce temporal community identification using the Δ-screening algorithm, which has the flexibility to account for varying community compositions, merging and splitting behaviors within dynamically evolving chemical networks. When applied to a complex chemical system whose varying chemical environments cause multiple time scale behavior, Δ-screening is able to resolve the multiple time scales of temporal communities. This computationally efficient algorithm is easily adapted to a wide range of dynamic chemical systems; flexibility in implementation allows the user to increase or decrease the resolution of temporal features by controlling parameters associated with community composition and fluctuations therein.

WAFNRLTG: A Novel Model for Predicting LncRNA Target Genes Based on Weighted Average Fusion Network Representation Learning Method

Long non-coding RNAs (lncRNAs) do not encode proteins, yet they have been well established to be involved in complex regulatory functions, and lncRNA regulatory dysfunction can lead to a variety of human complex diseases. LncRNAs mostly exert their functions by regulating the expressions of target genes, and accurate prediction of potential lncRNA target genes would be helpful to further understanding the functional annotations of lncRNAs. Considering the limitations in traditional computational methods for predicting lncRNA target genes, a novel model which was named Weighted Average Fusion Network Representation learning for predicting LncRNA Target Genes (WAFNRLTG) was proposed. First, a novel heterogeneous network was constructed by integrating lncRNA sequence similarity network, mRNA sequence similarity network, lncRNA-mRNA interaction network, lncRNA-miRNA interaction network and mRNA-miRNA interaction network. Next, four popular network representation learning methods were utilized to gain the representation vectors of lncRNA and mRNA nodes. Then, the representations of lncRNAs and target genes in the heterogeneous network were obtained with the weighted average fusion network representation learning method. Finally, we merged the representations of lncRNAs and related target genes to form lncRNA-gene pairs, trained the XGBoost classifier and predicted potential lncRNA target genes. In five-cross validations on the training and independent datasets, the experimental results demonstrated that WAFNRLTG obtained better AUC scores (0.9410, 0.9350) and AUPR scores (0.9391, 0.9350). Moreover, case studies of three common lncRNAs were performed for predicting their potential lncRNA target genes and the results confirmed the effectiveness of WAFNRLTG. The source codes and all data of WAFNRLTG can be freely downloaded at https://github.com/HGDYZW/WAFNRLTG.

NR4A3 and CCL20 clusters dominate the genetic networks in CD146+ blood cells during acute myocardial infarction in humans

BACKGROUND

CD146 is a tight junction-associated molecule involved in maintaining endothelial barrier, and balancing immune-inflammation response, in cardiovascular disease. Notably, peripheral CD146+ cells significantly upsurge under vessel dyshomeostasis such as acute myocardial injury (AMI), appearing to be a promising therapeutic target. In this study, with a new view of gene correlation, we aim at deciphering the complex underlying mechanism of CD146+ cells' impact in the development of AMI.

METHODS

Transcription dataset GSE 66,360 of CD146+ blood cells from clinical subjects was downloaded from NCBI. Pearson networks were constructed and the clustering coefficients were calculated to disclose the differential connectivity genes (DCGs). Analysis of gene connectivity and gene expression were performed to reveal the hub genes and hub gene clusters followed by gene enrichment analysis.

RESULTS AND CONCLUSIONS

Among the total 23,520 genes, 27 genes out of 126 differential expression genes were identified as DCGs. These DCGs were found in the periphery of the networks under normal condition, but transferred to the functional center after AMI. Moreover, it was revealed that DCGs spontaneously crowded together into two functional models, CCL20 cluster and NR4A3 cluster, influencing the CD146-mediated signaling pathways during the pathology of AMI for the first time.

Dynamic maintenance model for high average-utility pattern mining with deletion operation

The high average-utility itemset mining (HAUIM) was established to provide a fair measure instead of genetic high-utility itemset mining (HUIM) for revealing the satisfied and interesting patterns. In practical applications, the database is dynamically changed when insertion/deletion operations are performed on databases. Several works were designed to handle the insertion process but fewer studies focused on processing the deletion process for knowledge maintenance. In this paper, we then develop a PRE-HAUI-DEL algorithm that utilizes the pre-large concept on HAUIM for handling transaction deletion in the dynamic databases. The pre-large concept is served as the buffer on HAUIM that reduces the number of database scans while the database is updated particularly in transaction deletion. Two upper-bound values are also established here to reduce the unpromising candidates early which can speed up the computational cost. From the experimental results, the designed PRE-HAUI-DEL algorithm is well performed compared to the Apriori-like model in terms of runtime, memory, and scalability in dynamic databases.

Learning emotional word embeddings for sentiment analysis

Word embeddings have been successfully applied in many natural language processing tasks due to its their effectiveness. However, the state-of-the-art algorithms for learning word representations from large amounts of text documents ignore emotional information, which is a significant research problem that must be addressed. To solve the above problem, we propose an emotional word embedding (EWE) model for sentiment analysis in this paper. This method first applies pre-trained word vectors to represent document features using two different linear weighting methods. Then, the resulting document vectors are input to a classification model and used to train a text sentiment classifier, which is based on a neural network. In this way, the emotional polarity of the text is propagated into the word vectors. The experimental results on three kinds of real-world data sets demonstrate that the proposed EWE model achieves superior performances on text sentiment prediction, text similarity calculation, and word emotional expression tasks compared to other state-of-the-art models.

A novel genetic algorithm-based improvement model for online communities and trust networks

Social network analysis offers an understanding of our modern world, and it affords the ability to represent, analyze and even simulate complex structures. While an unweighted model can be used for online communities, trust or friendship networks should be analyzed with weighted models. To analyze social networks, it is essential to produce realistic social models. However, there are serious differences between social network models and real-life data in terms of their fundamental statistical parameters. In this paper, a genetic algorithm (GA)-based social network improvement method is proposed to produce social networks more similar to real-life data sets. First, it creates a social model based on existing studies in the literature, and then it improves the model with the proposed GA-based approach based on the similarity of the average degree, the k-nearest neighbor, the clustering coefficient, degree distribution and link overlap. This study can be used to model the structural and statistical properties of large-scale societies more realistically. The performance results show that our approach can reduce the dissimilarity between the created social networks and the real-life data sets in terms of their primary statistical properties. It has been shown that the proposed GA-based approach can be used effectively not only in unweighted networks but also in weighted networks.

A user interest community evolution model based on subgraph matching for social networking in mobile edge computing environments

With the rapid development of mobile edge computing, mobile social networks are gradually infiltrating into our daily lives, in which the communities are an important part of social networks. Internet of People such as online social networks is the next frontier for the Internet of Things. The combination of social networking and mobile edge computing has an important application value and is the development trend of future networks. However, how to detect evolutionary communities accurately and efficiently in dynamic heterogeneous social networks remains a fundamental problem. In this paper, a novel User Interest Community Evolution (UICE) model based on subgraph matching is proposed for accurately detecting the corresponding communities in the evolution of the user interest community. The community evolutionary events can be quickly captured including forming, dissolving, evolving and so on with the introduction of core subgraph. A variant of subgraph matching, called Subgraph Matching with Dynamic Weight (SMDW), is proposed to solve the problem of updating the core subgraph due to the change of core user’s interest when tracking evolutionary communities. Finally, the experiments based on the real datasets have been designed to evaluate the performance of the proposed model by comparing it with the state-of-art methods in this area and complete data processing through the local edge computing layer. The experimental results demonstrate that the UICE model presented in this paper has achieved better accuracy, higher efficiency and better scalability against existing methods.

A comparative study on heterogeneous information network embeddings

Heterogeneous information networks are widely used to represent real world applications in forms of social networks, word co-occurrence networks, and communication networks, etc. However, It is difficult for traditional machine learning methods to analyze these networks effectively. Heterogeneous information network embedding aims to convert the network into low dimensional vectors, which facilitates the following tasks. Thus it is receiving tremendous attention from the research community due to its effectiveness and efficiency. Although numerous methods have been present and applied successfully, there are few works to make a comparative study on heterogeneous information network embedding, which is very important for developers and researchers to select an appropriate method. To address the above problem, we make a comparative study on the heterogeneous information network embeddings. Specifically, we first give the problem definition of heterogeneous information network embedding. Then the heterogeneous information networks are classified into four categories from the perspective of network type. The state-of-the-art methods for each category are also compared and reviewed. Finally, we make a conclusion and suggest some potential future research directions.

Human motion recognition based on SVM in VR art media interaction environment

In order to solve the problem of human motion recognition in multimedia interaction scenarios in virtual reality environment, a motion classification and recognition algorithm based on linear decision and support vector machine (SVM) is proposed. Firstly, the kernel function is introduced into the linear discriminant analysis for nonlinear projection to map the training samples into a high-dimensional subspace to obtain the best classification feature vector, which effectively solves the nonlinear problem and expands the sample difference. The genetic algorithm is used to realize the parameter search optimization of SVM, which makes full use of the advantages of genetic algorithm in multi-dimensional space optimization. The test results show that compared with other classification recognition algorithms, the proposed method has a good classification effect on multiple performance indicators of human motion recognition and has higher recognition accuracy and better robustness.