Complex Network Measurements: Estimating the Relevance of Observed Properties

Matthieu Latapy and Clémence Magnien

Infocom’08 Proceedings, Phoenix, USA

Complex networks, modeled as large graphs, received much attention during these last years. However, data on such networks is only available through intricate measurement procedures. Until recently, most studies assumed that these procedures eventually lead to samples large enough to be representative of the whole, at least concerning some key properties. This has crucial impact on network modeling and simulation, which rely on these properties. Recent contributions proved that this approach may be misleading, but no solution has been proposed. We provide here the first practical way to distinguish between cases where it is indeed misleading, and cases where the observed properties may be trusted. It consists in studying how the properties of interest evolve when the sample grows, and in particular whether they reach a steady state or not. In order to illustrate this method and to demonstrate its relevance, we apply it to data-sets on complex network measurements that are representative of the ones commonly used. The obtained results show that the method fulfills its goals very well. We moreover identify some properties which seem easier to evaluate in practice, thus opening interesting perspectives.

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Efficient and Simple Encodings for the Web Graph

Jean-Loup Guillaume, Matthieu Latapy and Laurent Viennot

LNCS, proceedings of the 3-rd international conference Web-Age Information Management WAIM’02, 2002, Beijing, Chine. Abstract published in the proceedings of the 11-th international conference World Wide Web WWW’02, 2002, Honolulu, Hawaï

In this paper, we propose a set of simple and efficient methods based on standard, free and widely available tools, to store and manipulate large sets of URLs and large parts of the Web graph. Our aim is both to store efficiently the URLs list and the graph in order to manage all the computations in a computer central memory. We also want to make the conversion between URLs and their identifiers as fast as possible, and to obtain all the successors of an URL in the Web graph efficiently. The methods we propose make it possible to obtain a good compromise between these two challenges, and make it possible to manipulate large parts of the Web graph.

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