Le contrôle de la forme des réseaux par leurs membres : le fils de discussion comme réseau d’interaction

Bernard Conein (1) & Alexandre Delanoë (2)

Jeudi 09 janvier 2014 à 11h, salle 25-26/101

Slides

En proposant d’explorer comment, en envoyant un message sur une liste de discussion, un contributeur peut contrôler la forme du réseau dans lequel il intervient, on montrera quun fil de discussion peut se décrire comme un réseau de répliques dont lextension (nombre de messages, nombre de contributeurs) est gouvernée par des dynamiques de contrôle propre à certaines séquences d’interactions. Slides disponibles à l’adresse suivante : B. Conein :http://www.complexnetworks.fr/?p=1750 A. Delanoë : http://alexandre.delanoe.org/academie/docs/2014-01_DelanoeConein.svg

Detecting events in the dynamics of ego-centred measurements of the Internet topology

Matthieu Latapy, Assia Hamzaoui, Clémence Magnien

Journal of Complex Networks 2(1): 38-59, 2014

Detecting events such as major routing changes or congestions in the dynamics of the Internet topology is an important but challenging task. We explore here an empirical approach based on a notion of statistically significant events. It consists in identifying properties of graph dynamics which exhibit a homogeneous distribution with outliers, corresponding to events. We apply this approach to ego-centred measurements of the  Internet topology (views obtained from a single monitor) and show that it succeeds in detecting meaningful events. Finally, we give some hints for   the interpretation of detected events in terms of network operations.

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Inadequacy of SIR Model to Reproduce Key Properties of Real-world Spreading Phenomena: Experiments on a Large-scale P2P System

Daniel Bernardes, Matthieu Latapy, Fabien Tarissan

In Journal of Social Network Analysis and Mining, 3(4):1195-1208,Springer, 2013.

Understanding the spread of information on complex networks is a key issue from a theoretical and applied perspective. Despite the effort in developing theoretical models for this phenomenon, gauging them with large-scale real-world data remains an important challenge due to the scarcity of open, extensive and detailed data. In this paper, we explain how traces of peer-to-peer file sharing may be used to this goal. We reconstruct the underlying social network of peers sharing content and perform simulations on it to assess the relevance of the standard SIR model to mimic key properties of real spreading cascades. First we examine the impact of the network topology on observed properties. Then we turn to the evaluation of two heterogeneous extensions of the SIR model. Finally we improve the social network reconstruction, introducing an affinity index between peers, and simulate a SIR model which integrates this new feature. We conclude that the simple, homogeneous model is insufficient to mimic real spreading cascades. Moreover, none of the natural extensions of the model we considered, which take into account extra topological properties, yielded satisfying results in our context. This raises an alert against the careless, widespread use of this model.

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On the relevance of the edge-Markovian evolving graph model for real mobile networks

Aurélie Faure de Pebeyre, Fabien Tarissan et Julien Sopena

IFIP Wireless Days conference (WD’13), Valencia, Spain, 2013

The development of wireless devices led the scientific community to focus more and more on systems of interaction composed of moving entities. In this context, different models have been proposed in an attempt to capture properties of the observed dynamics. Among those models, the edge-Markovian evolving graph model is appealing since it enables to highlight temporal dependencies in the evolution of the graphs. This model relies on two parameters accounting respectively for the creation and suppression of links in the graph. Thus it assumes that these two parameters are sufficient to characterise the dynamics during all the evolution of the graph. In this paper, we test this hypothesis by confronting the model to 6 datasets recording real traces of evolving networks. In particular, we study the proportion of created and deleted links over the time. The results show that 5 of the 6 case studies present an heterogeneous distribution of those fractions which contradicts the underlying hypothesis of the model. Besides, in order to understand the importance this might have as regard structural properties of real networks, we also study the impact the Markovian model has on the mean degree over the time. It turns out that even in the suitable case, the model fails to reproduce correctly this property which indicates its inadequacy for even more complex properties of real evolving networks

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Détection de communautés recouvrantes dans des réseaux de terrain dynamiques

Qinna Wang

Jeudi 12 Décembre 2013 à 14h,salle 25-26/101

Slides

Dans le contexte des réseaux complexes, la structure communautaire du réseau devient un sujet important pour plusieurs domaines de recherche. Les communautés sont en général vues comme des groupes intérieurement denses. La détection de tels groupes offre un éclairage intéressant sur la structure du réseau. Par exemple, une communauté de pages web regroupe des pages traitant du même sujet. La définition de communautés est en général limitée à une partition de lensemble des nœuds. Cela exclut par définition quun nœud puisse appartenir à plusieurs communautés, ce qui pourtant est naturel dans de nombreux (cas des réseaux sociaux par exemple). Une autre question importante et sans réponse est létude des réseaux et de leur structure communautaire en tenant compte de leur dynamique. Cettethèseporte sur létude de réseaux dynamiques et la détection de communautés recouvrantes. Nous proposons deux méthodes différentes pour la détection de communautés recouvrantes. La première méthode est appelée optimisationde clique. L’optimisation de clique vise à détecter les nœuds recouvrants granulaires. La méthode de l’optimisation de clique est une approche à grain fin. La seconde méthode est nommée détection floue (fuzzy detection). Cette méthode est à grain plus grossier et vise à identifier les groupes recouvrants. Nous appliquons ces deux méthodes à des réseaux synthétiques et réels. Les résultats obtenus indiquent que les deux méthodes peuvent être utilisées pour caractériser les nœuds recouvrants. Les deux approches apportent des points de vue distincts et complémentaires. Dans le cas des graphes dynamiques, nous donnons une définition sur la relation entre les communautés à deux pas de temps consécutif. Cette technique permet de représenter le changement de la structure en fonction du temps. Pour mettre en évidence cette relation, nous proposons des diagrammes de lignage pour la visualisation de la dynamique des communautés. Ces diagrammes qui connectent des communautés à des pas de temps successifs montrent lévolution de la structure et l’évolution des groupes recouvrantes., Nous avons également appliquer ces outils à des cas concrets.

Method of reliability and availability analysis – From the dynamic properties of routing and forwarding paths

Dimitri Papadimitriou, Davide Careglio, Fabien Tarissan and Piet Demeester

Proceedings of the International Workshop on Reliable Networks Design and Modeling (RNDM’13), 2013 (Invited paper)

Confronted to the increasing dynamic of Internet routing system and its underlying topology, we propose a reliability and availability analysis method based on the characterization of the dynamic properties (in particular, the stability properties) of routing paths and their corresponding forwarding paths. The key driver underlying this method is that transient but frequent changes in the spatio-temporal properties of routing paths can affect the performance and operating conditions of the corresponding forwarding paths; hence, their reliability. The results obtained by means of this method verify that, although the main cause of instability results from the forwarding plane dynamics, a second order effect relates forwarding and routing path instability events. Applying our analysis method reveals that the dominant source (main cause) of instability originates indeed from the forwarding plane. This result which confirms previous studies from 2003 further corroborates the assumption that the dynamic properties of routing system are mainly driven by its adaptation to the forwarding system (adaptive routing). However, even if the likelihood of forwarding instability becomes the prominent behavior (cause), about 50% of them induce routing path instability whereas the corresponding forwarding path remains unstable. This observation suggests that 50% of the reactive decisions performed by the BGP routing system (reactive routing) tend to further delay convergence of the forwarding paths. In turn, this observation provides the first indication that simple causal effects can’t explain anymore the occurrence of instability. Moreover, more elaborated analysis techniques (such as the one proposed in this paper) are required to explain the inter-dependent routing and forwarding paths dynamics which affects their reliability and availability.

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Un modèle pour les graphes bipartis aléatoires avec redondance

Émilie Coupechoux and Fabien Tarissan

4ème Journées Modèles et l’Analyse des Réseaux : Approches Mathématiques et Informatique (MARAMI’13), 2013

Current models of random graphs do not capture all the properties observed in realworld networks. In particular, two cliques in such models generally do not have more than one node in common, while it is intuitive that, in social networks for instance, two friends have more than one interest in common. The model presented here aims at capturing this kind of property. More precisely, we present a model for random tripartite graphs such that the bipartite projection has degree and redundancy distributions close to those of a given bipartite graph.

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valuation du modèle évolutif par arête-markovienne pour reproduire la dynamique des réseaux mobiles

Aurélie Faure de Pebeyre, Fabien Tarissan and Julien Sopena

In 4ème Journées Modèles et l’Analyse des Réseaux : Approches Mathématiques et Informatique (MARAMI’13), 2013

L’avènement des équipements mobiles a amené la communauté scientifique à étudier plus intensément les systèmes d’interactions formés par des entités en mouvement. Dans ce contexte, plusieurs modèles ont été proposés pour tenter de capturer les propriétés dynamiques de tels systèmes. Parmi ceux-ci, le modèle de graphes évolutifs à arêtes markoviennes est attirant en ce qu’il met en avant les dépendances temporelles dans un graphe dynamique. Ce modèle repose sur l’identification de deux paramètres régissant respectivement l’apparition et la disparition des liens dans le graphe et fait donc l’hypothèse que ces deux paramètres sont suffisants pour caractériser cette dynamique sur l’ensemble de la durée de vie du graphe. Dans cet article nous testons la pertinence de cette hypothèse par rapport à 6 jeux de données réelles. Pour se faire, nous avons étudié la fraction de liens créés et supprimés au cours du temps. Les résultats montrent que dans 5 cas sur les 6 étudiés, la répartition de ces fractions est hétérogène, ce qui contredit l’hypothèse faite par le modèle. De plus, nous avons regardé l’impact que le modèle markovien avait sur le degré moyen des nœuds au cours du temps. Il s’avère que même dans le jeu de données favorable au modèle, ce dernier échoue à rendre compte du comportement des réseaux dynamiques de façon satisfaisante.

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Une plus grande utilisation de la théorie des graphes dans l’analyse des réseaux

Bertrand Jouve

Jeudi 21 novembre 2013 à 11h, salle 25-26/101

A partir de deux exemples d’applications sur des données historiques (reconstruction de réseaux sociaux de la paysannerie médiévale et dynamiques de parcellaires anciens), nous montrerons comment il est possible d’améliorer nos outils de la théorie des graphes pour l’analyse des réseaux d’interactions. Nous baserons notre propos sur des recherches en théorie intervallaire et en topologie algébrique.

Les capitalistes sociaux sur Twitter : détection, évolution, caractérisation

Nicolas Dugué

Jeudi 07 novembre 2013 à 11h, salle 25-26/101

Slides

Les capitalistes sociaux sont des utilisateurs particuliers de Twitter. Ces utilisateurs cherchent à obtenir un maximum de followers par des méthodes que nous décrirons pour gagner de la visibilité sur ce réseau. La visibilité et la potentielle influence obtenues par ces utilisateurs ne sont pas basées sur le contenu de leurs tweets et la crédibilité de leur compte mais sur une accumulation de followers artificielle. Il est donc intéressant de détecter ces utilisateurs afin d’étudier leur réelle influence sur le réseau. Nous proposons une méthode de détection des capitalistes sociaux utilisant des mesures simples basées sur la topologie du réseau uniquement. Suite à cela, nous montrons que les méthodes employées par ces utilisateurs font qu’ils forment un sous groupe densément connecté dans le graphe représentant le réseau. Par ailleurs, à travers une étude sur l’évolution de certains de ces comptes entre 2009 et 2013, nous démontrons l’efficacité de ces techniques pour accumuler des followers. Nous confirmons ensuite grâce à un compte Twitter automatisé qu’il est toujours possible d’appliquer ces méthodes. Enfin, nous nous intéressons à la position des capitalistes sociaux dans le réseau. Nous nous basons ainsi sur la notion de rôles communautaires introduite par Guimerà et Amaral pour caractériser la position de ces utilisateurs au sein des communautés du réseau. Nous généralisons cette méthode, l’adaptons aux graphes orientés et montrons que les capitalistes sociaux occupent des rôles spécifiques.

Analyse des réseaux et géographie politique : l’ONU comme terrain de jeu

Laurent Beauguitte

Jeudi 24 octobre 2013 à 11h, salle 26-00/428

Slides

Si la géographie a longtemps et de manière quasi exclusive privilégié l’étude des réseaux techniques (réseaux de transport notamment, voir Barthelemy, 2011), l’analyse de réseau, entendue comme une boîte à outils méthodologiques plus que comme une théorie des phénomènes sociaux, permet d’enrichir les approches en géographie économique ou politique. Cette présentation montre comment divers outils et mesures, issus de la Social network analysis comme des Complex network studies, peuvent être mobilisés pour une réflexion relative à la régionalisation politique du monde. La première partie présente le cadre épistémologique et les emprunts disciplinaires effectués. Diverses hypothèses relatives à la régionalisation politique sont ensuite exposées ainsi que les principaux résultats obtenus avec des données issues de l’Assemblée générale de l’ONU (vote et parrainage de résolution, lien entre tats et groupes régionaux). Enfin, une troisième partie souligne les limites conceptuelles et méthodologiques des choix effectués et de possibles pistes de recherche permettant de les contourner. Si la pluri-disciplinarité paraît une voie prometteuse, les obstacles demeurent et ne se limitent pas à des choix lexicaux divergents. Références Marc Barthelemy, 2011, Spatial networks, Physics reports, 499, 1-101. Laurent Beauguitte, 2011, L’Assemblée générale de l’ONU de 1985 à nos jours. Essai de géographie politique quantitative, Thèse de doctorat, Université Denis Diderot Paris 7, disponible sur TEL.

The Random Subgraph Model for the analysis of an ecclesiastical network in Merovingian Gaul

Charles Bouveyron

Jeudi 03 octobre 2013 à 11h, salle 25-26/101

Slides

In the last two decades, many random graph models have been proposed to extract knowledge from networks. Most of them look for communities or more generally clusters of vertices with homogeneous connection profiles. While the first models focused on networks with binary edges only, extensions now allow to deal with valued networks. Recently, new models were also introduced in order to characterize connection patterns in networks through mixed memberships. This work was motivated by the need of analyzing a historical network where a partition of the vertices is given and where edges are typed. A known partition is seen as a decomposition of a network into subgraphs that we propose to model using a stochastic model with unknown latent clusters. Each subgraph has its own mixing vector and sees its vertices associated to the clusters. The vertices then connect with a probability depending on the subgraphs only, while the types of the edges are assumed to be sampled from the latent clusters. A variational Bayes expectation-maximization algorithm is proposed for inference as well as a model selection criterion for the estimation of the cluster number. Experiments are carried out on simulated data to assess the approach. The proposed methodology is then applied to an ecclesiastical network in merovingian Gaul. An R package, called Rambo, implementing the inference algorithm is available on the CRAN. This is a joint work with Y. Jernite, P. Latouche, P. Rivera, L. Jegou & S. Lamassé. Preprint available at http://arxiv.org/abs/1212.5497.

The Power of Consensus: Random Graphs Have No Communities

Romain Campigotto, Jean-Loup Guillaume and Massoud Seifi

Proceedings of the 5th IEEE/ACM International Conference on Advances in Social Networks and Mining (ASONAM 2013). Niagara Falls, Canada.

Communities are a powerful tool to describe the structure of complex networks. Algorithms aiming at maximizing a quality function called modularity have been shown to effectively compute the community structure. However, some problems remain: in particular, it is possible to find high modularity partitions in graph without any community structure, in particular random graphs. In this paper, we study the notion of consensual communities and show that they do not exist in random graphs. For that, we exhibit a phase transition based on the strength of consensus: below a given threshold, all the nodes belongs to the same consensual community; above this threshold, each node is in its own consensual community.

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Assessing Group Cohesion in Homophily Networks

Benjamin Renoust

Mardi 17 septembre 2013 à 11h, salle 25-26/101

Slides

The analysis and exploration of a social network depends on the type of relations at play. Borgatti had proposed a type taxonomy organizing relations in four possible categories. Homophily (similarity) relationships form an important category where relations occur when entities of the network link whenever they exhibit similar behaviors. Examples are networks of co-author, where homophily between two persons follows from co-authorship; or network of actors having played under the supervision of the same movie director, for instance. Homophily is often embodied through a bipartite network where entities of a given type A (authors, movie directors) connect through entities of a different type B (papers, actors). A common strategy is then to project this bipartite graph onto a single-type network with entities of a same type A , possibly weighting edges based on how the type A entities interact with the type B entities underlying the edge. The resulting single-type network can then be studied using standard techniques such as community detection using edge density, or the computation of various centrality indices. This paper revisits this type of approach and introduces three measures derived from past work by Burt. Two entities of type B interact when they both induce a same edge between two entities of type A . The homogeneity of a subgroup thus depends on how intensely and how equally interactions occur between entities of type B giving rise to the subgroup. The measure thus differentiates between subgroups of type A exhibiting similar topologies depending on the interaction patterns of the underlying entities of type B.

Towards realistic modeling of IP-level routing topology dynamics

Clémence Magnien, Amélie Medem, Sergey Kirgizov, Fabien Tarissan

Networking Science, 4 (1-4), p. 24-33, 2013

Many works have studied the Internet topology, but few have investigated the question of how it evolves over time. This paper focuses on the Internet routing IP-level topology and proposes a first step towards realistic modeling of its dynamics. We study periodic measurements of routing trees from a single monitor to a fixed destination set and identify invariant properties of its dynamics. Based on those observations, we then propose a model for the underlying mechanisms of the topology dynamics. Our model remains simple as it only incorporates load-balancing phenomena and routing changes. By extensive simulations,  we show that, despite its simplicity, this model effectively captures the observed behaviors, thus providing key insights of relevant mechanisms governing the Internet routing dynamics. Besides, by confronting simulations over different kinds of topology, we also provide insights of which structural properties play a key role to explain the properties of the observed dynamics, which therefore strengthens the relevance of our model.

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The network of the International Criminal Court decisions as a complex system

Fabien Tarissan and Raphaëlle Nollez-Goldbach

ISCS 2013: Interdisciplinary Symposium on Complex Systems, Emergence, Complexity and Computation, 8:225-264, Springer, 2013.

Many real-world networks lend themselves to the use of graphs for analysing and modeling their structure. This approach has proved to be very useful for a wide variety of networks stemming from very different fields. Yet, only few papers focused their attention on legal networks. This paper intends precisely to remedy this situation by analysing a major legal network by means of complex system methods. The network under investigation is the network composed by decisions taken by the International Criminal Court since its creation. We first model the network by a simple directed graph in which nodes are the decisions and links represent citations between decisions. Our analysis shows that standard properties shared by common real networks are also present in this network. Then we turn to studying the network by means of bipartite graphs that involve both decisions and articles of law. We show that this two-level structure presents several non trivial properties and we show evidences of the relevance of the bipartite representation to explain properties observed in the graph of citations.

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A Matter of Time – Intrinsic or Extrinsic – for Diffusion in Evolving Complex Networks

Alice Albano, Jean-Loup Guillaume, Sébastien Heymann and Bénédicte Le Grand

Proceedings of the 2013 IEEE/ACM International Conference on Advances  n Social Networks Analysis and Mining (ASONAM 2013), Niagara Falls, Canada

Diffusion phenomena occur in many kinds of real-world complex networks, e.g., biological, information or social networks. Because of this diversity, several types of diffusion models have been proposed in the literature: epidemiological models, threshold models, innovation adoption models, among others. Many studies aim at investigating diffusion as an evolving phenomenon but mostly occurring on static networks, and much remains to be done to understand diffusion on evolving networks. In order to study the impact of graph dynamics on diffusion, we propose in this paper an innovative approach based on a notion of intrinsic time, where the time unit corresponds to the appearance of a new link in the graph. This original notion of time allows us to isolate somehow the diffusion phenomenon from the evolution of the network. The objective is to compare the diffusion features observed with this intrinsic time concept from those obtained with traditional (extrinsic) time, based on seconds. The comparison of these time concepts is easily understandable yet completely new in the study of diffusion phenomena. We experiment our approach on synthetic graphs, as well as on a dataset extracted from the Github sofware sharing platform.

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valuation et optimisation d’une partition hiérarchique de graphe

François Queyroi

Mardi 09 juillet 2013 à 14h, salle 25-26/101

Slides

Des travaux en sociologie, géographie ou biologie suggèrent la présence d’une structure de communautés multi-niveaux au sein des réseaux complexes. Cette structure peut être modélisée par un partitionnement hiérarchique des sommets d’un graphe. Plusieurs algorithmes ont été proposés récemment pour répondre à ce problème. En revanche, la question de l’évaluation d’une partition hiérarchique a été peu étudiée. Je présenterai une généralisation des mesures de qualité additives au partitionnements multi-niveaux. Cette généralisation sinterprète comme un parcours des nœuds de l’arbre de partition réalisé en propageant le « gain » de chaque groupe à ses descendants. Je discuterai également plusieurs applications possible utilisant ce nouveau type de mesure ; notamment l’optimisation de la hiérarchie produite lors du déroulement de l’algorithme de Louvain.

Using the Framework of Networks to Enhance Learning and Social Interactions

Dmitry Paranyushkin

Jeudi 27 juin 2013 à 11h, salle 55-65/211

Slides

The increasingly interconnected world brings up the new challenges related to rapid defragmentation of information and cognitive overload. The existing recommender systems and social networks tend to pack concepts and people into tightly-knit interest communities producing so-called filter bubbles » (Pariser 2011), making it difficult for such systems to evolve, adapt, and innovate. To address those challenges, we developed several social interaction strategies and online tools that are aimed at creating the new possibilities for communication and learning. The intention is to find out how the framework of networks can be used to enhance our learning strategies and expand ones capabilities for social interactions. Specifically, were interested in the notion of metastability the ability of a dynamical system to maintain several distinct latent states at once, which can interact and produce complex behavior on the global level. Metastable dynamics has been shown to be essential to adaptability of a complex system, which has to respond to the constantly changing environment. In this seminar we will present several case studies conducted by Nodus Labs. One of the projects we will present to exemplify our ideas is the online text network visualization tool – http://textexture.com – which can be used to represent any text as a network of interrelated concepts. The graph can then be used to get a general idea or a summary of the texts content, as well as the relations between the different topics present within the text. It can also be used for non-linear fast reading, allowing the users to create different narratives that are more relevant to their fields of interest. We will also present several case studies from our workshop and educational practice (see http://noduslabs.com for more information), where we created so-called constructed situations. In those carefully designed social settings we invited the participants to explore the basic ideas of network dynamics and metastability. The intention was to demonstrate how network thinking can be used to increase ones choices in any social or collaborative situation and lead to a better awareness of communicative dynamics within a group of people.

Scalable Analysis for Network Monitoring and Forensics Purposes

Jérôme François

Jeudi 06 juin 2013 à 11h30, salle 55-65/211

Slides

Security issues in Internet force the deployment of defensive measures to protect end users and Internet’s infrastructure itself. While a simple firewall would have been enough in the past, the trend is to promote a deeper analysis nowadays, in particular at the Internet operator level. Simple filtering has to be completed using more in-depth analysis tool. Detection of attacks may have to investigate multiple sources of data meantime and such sources, like network traffic captures, syslog, alerts or locations, may generate huge quantities of data. Forensics alleviates the real-time constraint but requires a perfect and global understanding of an intrusion to recover, protect in future and trigger legal actions as well. Hence, the problem is similar and finding evidences is like looking for a needle in a haystack. Therefore, the seminar will introduce several techniques to cope with big data issues in the context of security. Firstly, flow based methods will be presented as, for example, to track community of hosts participating to a botnet. This is possible by analyzing the traffic flow dependency in Internet and host relationships. Cyber-criminal organizations, like the Russian Business Network, are well organized and constructs their own Internet infrastructure and administrative domains which make them quite resistant to standard counter-measures like IP blacklisting. The seminar will then highlight how to reveal the underlying organization structure at a the Internet administrative domain level.