Informative Core Identification in Complex Networks

• Activity Number: 368 - Recent Advances in Statistical Network Analysis with Applications
• Type: Invited
• Date/Time: Wednesday, August 10, 2022 : 8:30 AM to 10:20 AM
• Sponsor: Section on Statistical Graphics
• Author(s): Ruizhong Miao and Tianxi Li*
• Companies: University of Virginia and University of Virginia
• Keywords: Random network; core-periphery

Abstract

In network analysis, the core structure of modeling interest is usually hidden in a larger network in which most structures are not informative. The noise and bias introduced by the non-informative component in networks can obscure the salient structure and limit many network modeling procedures' effectiveness. This talk introduces a novel core-periphery model for the non-informative periphery structure of networks without imposing a specific form for the informative core structure. We propose spectral algorithms for core identification as a data preprocessing step for general downstream network analysis tasks based on the model. The algorithm enjoys a strong theoretical guarantee of accuracy and is scalable for large networks. We evaluate the proposed method by extensive simulation studies demonstrating various advantages over many traditional core-periphery methods. The method is applied to extract the informative core structure from a citation network and give more informative results in the downstream hierarchical community detection.