Esteban Bautista, Matthieu Latapy

In « Temporal Network Theory », Holme, P. and Saramäki, J. (eds), Springer, 2023

DOI: 10.1007/978-3-031-30399-9_22œ

Betweenness centrality is one of the most important concepts in graph analysis. It was rA A link stream is a set of possibly weighted triplets (t, u, v) modeling that u and v interacted at A link stream is a set of possibly weighted triplets (t, u, v) modeling that u and v interacted at time t. Link streams offer an effective model for datasets containing both temporal and relational information, making their proper analysis crucial in many applications. They are commonly regarded as sequences of graphs or collections of time series. Yet, a recent seminal work demonstrated that link streams are more general objects of which graphs are only particular cases. It therefore started the construction of a dedicated formalism for link streams by extending graph theory. In this work, we contribute to the development of this formalism by showing that link streams also generalize time series. In particular, we show that a link stream corresponds to a time-series extended to a relational dimension, which opens the door to also extend the framework of signal processing to link streams. We therefore develop extensions of numerous signal concepts to link streams: from elementary ones like energy, correlation, and differentiation, to more advanced ones like Fourier transform and filters.

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Frédéric Simard, Clémence Magnien, Matthieu Latapy

Journal of Graph Algorithms and Applications 27:3, 2023 DOI: 10.7155/jgaa.00620

Betweenness centrality is one of the most important concepts in graph analysis. It was recently extended to link streams, a graph generalization where links arrive over time. However, its computation raises non-trivial issues, due in particular to the fact that time is considered as continuous. We provide here the first algorithms to compute this generalized betweenness centrality, as well as several companion algorithms that have their own interest. They work in polynomial time and space, we illustrate them on typical examples, and we provide an implementation.

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Code available here

Esteban Bautista, Matthieu Latapy

Fifth IEEE International Conference on Cognitive Machine Intelligence (CogMI), 2023

A link stream is a set of triplets (t,u,v) indicating that u and v interacted at time t. Link streams model numerous datasets and their proper study is crucial in many applications. In practice, raw link streams are often aggregated or transformed into time series or graphs where decisions are made. Yet, it remains unclear how the dynamical and structural information of a raw link stream carries into the transformed object. This work shows that it is possible to shed light into this question by studying link streams via algebraically linear graph and signal operators, for which we introduce a novel linear matrix framework for the analysis of link streams. We show that, due to their linearity, most methods in signal processing can be easily adopted by our framework to analyze the time/frequency information of link streams. However, the availability of linear graph methods to analyze relational/structural information is limited. We address this limitation by developing (i) a new basis for graphs that allow us to decompose them into structures at different resolution levels; and (ii) filters for graphs that allow us to change their structural information in a controlled manner. By plugging-in these developments and their time-domain counterpart into our framework, we are able to (i) obtain a new basis for link streams that allow us to represent them in a frequency-structure domain; and (ii) show that many interesting transformations to link streams, like the aggregation of interactions or their embedding into a euclidean space, can be seen as simple filters in our frequency-structure domain.

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Alexis Baudin, Lionel Tabourier, Clémence Magnien

30th International Symposium on Temporal Representation and Reasoning (TIME 2023)

Community detection is a popular approach to understand the organization of interactions in static networks. For that purpose, the Clique Percolation Method (CPM), which involves the percolation of k-cliques, is a well-studied technique that offers several advantages. Besides, studying interactions that occur over time is useful in various contexts, which can be modeled by the link stream formalism. The Dynamic Clique Percolation Method (DCPM) has been proposed for extending CPM to temporal networks.
However, existing implementations are unable to handle massive datasets. We present a novel algorithm that adapts CPM to link streams, which has the advantage that it allows us to speed up the computation time with respect to the existing DCPM method. We evaluate it experimentally on real datasets and show that it scales to massive link streams. For example, it allows to obtain a complete set of communities in under twenty-five minutes for a dataset with thirty million links, what the state of the art fails to achieve even after a week of computation. We further show that our method provides communities similar to DCPM, but slightly more aggregated. We exhibit the relevance of the obtained communities in real world cases, and show that they provide information on the importance of vertices in the link streams.

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Alexis Baudin, Clémence Magnien, Lionel Tabourier

arXiv preprint arXiv:2302.00360

Link streams offer a good model for representing interactions over time. They consist of links (b,e,u,v), where u and v are vertices interacting during the whole time interval [b,e]. In this paper, we deal with the problem of enumerating maximal cliques in link streams. A clique is a pair (C,[t0,t1]), where C is a set of vertices that all interact pairwise during the full interval [t0,t1]. It is maximal when neither its set of vertices nor its time interval can be increased. Some of the main works solving this problem are based on the famous Bron-Kerbosch algorithm for enumerating maximal cliques in graphs. We take this idea as a starting point to propose a new algorithm which matches the cliques of the instantaneous graphs formed by links existing at a given time t to the maximal cliques of the link stream. We prove its validity and compute its complexity, which is better than the state-of-the art ones in many cases of interest. We also study the output-sensitive complexity, which is close to the output size, thereby showing that our algorithm is efficient. To confirm this, we perform experiments on link streams used in the state of the art, and on massive link streams, up to 100 million links. In all cases our algorithm is faster, mostly by a factor of at least 10 and up to a factor of 10**4. Moreover, it scales to massive link streams for which the existing algorithms are not able to provide the solution.

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Alexis Baudin, Clémence Magnien, Lionel Tabourier

EGC 2023, vol. RNTI-E-39, pp.139-150

Les flots de liens offrent un formalisme de description d’interactions au cours du temps. Un lien correspond à deux sommets qui interagissent sur un intervalle de temps. Une clique est un ensemble de sommets associé à un intervalle de temps durant lequel ils sont tous connectés. Elle est maximale si ni son ensemble de sommets ni son intervalle de temps ne peuvent être augmentés. Les algorithmes existants pour énumérer ces structures ne permettent pas de traiter des jeux de données réels de plus de quelques centaines de milliers d’interactions. Or, l’accès à des données toujours plus massives demande d’adapter les outils à de plus grandes échelles. Nous proposons alors un algorithme qui énumère les cliques maximales sur des réseaux temporels réels et massifs atteignant jusqu’à plus de 100 millions de liens. Nous montrons expérimentalement qu’il améliore l’état de l’art de plusieurs ordres de grandeur.

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Fabrice Lécuyer, Louis Jachiet, Clémence Magnien, Lionel Tabourier

ALENEX 2023

Listing triangles is a fundamental graph problem with many applications, and large graphs require fast algorithms. Vertex ordering allows the orientation of edges from lower to higher vertex indices, and state-of-the-art triangle listing algorithms use this to accelerate their execution and to bound their time complexity. Yet, only basic orderings have been tested. In this paper, we show that studying the precise cost of algorithms instead of their bounded complexity leads to faster solutions. We introduce cost functions that link ordering properties with the running time of a given algorithm. We prove that their minimization is NP-hard and propose heuristics to obtain new orderings with different trade-offs between cost reduction and ordering time. Using datasets with up to two billion edges, we show that our heuristics accelerate the listing of triangles by an average of 38% when the ordering is already given as an input, and 16% when the ordering time is included.

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Antoine Genitrini, Mehdi Naima, Olivier Bodini

The 15th Latin American Theoretical Informatics Symposium (LATIN 2022)

In this paper we study a model of Schr ̈oder trees whose labelling is increasing along the branches. Such tree family is useful in the context of phylogenetic. The tree nodes are of arbitrary arity (i.e. out-degree) and the node labels can be repeated throughout different branches of the tree. Once a formal construction of the trees is formalized, we then turn to the enumeration of the trees inspired by a renormalisation due to Stanley on acyclic orientations of graphs. We thus exhibit links between our tree model and labelled graphs and prove a one-to-one correspondence between a subclass of our trees and labelled graphs. As a by-product we obtain a new natural combinatorial interpretation of Stanley’s renormalising factor. We then study different combinatorial characteristics of our tree model and finally, we design an efficient uniform random sampler for our tree model which allows to generate uniformly Erdös-Renyi graph with a constant number of rejections on
average.

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Maximilien Danisch, Ioannis Panagiotas, Lionel Tabourier

arXiv:2209.12062

In order to manage massive graphs in practice, it is often necessary to resort to graph compression, which aims at reducing the memory used when storing and processing the graph. Efficient compression methods have been proposed in the literature, especially for web graphs. In most cases, they are combined with a vertex reordering pre-processing step which significantly improves the compression rate. However, these techniques are not as efficient when considering other kinds of graphs. In this paper, we focus on the class of bipartite graphs and adapt the vertex reordering phase to their specific structure by proposing a dual reordering scheme. By reordering each group of vertices in the purpose of minimizing a specific score, we show that we can reach better compression rates. We also suggest that this approach can be further refined to make the node orderings more adapted to the compression phase that follows the ordering phase.

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Nouamane Arhachoui, Esteban Bautista, Maximilien Danisch, Anastasios Giovanidis

ASONAM 2022

Abstract—Measuring the influence of users in social networks is key for numerous applications. A recently proposed influence metric, coined as $\psi$-score, allows to go beyond traditional centrality metrics, which only assess structural graph importance, by further incorporating the rich information provided by the posting and re-posting activity of users. The $\psi$-score is shown in fact to generalize PageRank for non-homogeneous node activity. Despite its significance, it scales poorly to large datasets; for a network of N users it requires to solve N linear systems of equations of size N. To address this problem, this work introduces a novel scalable algorithm for the fast approximation of $\psi$-score, named Power-$\psi$. The proposed algorithm is based on a novel equation indicating that it suffices to solve one system of equations of size N to compute the $\psi$-score. Then, our algorithm exploits the fact that such system can be recursively and distributedly approximated to any desired error. This permits the $\psi$-score, summarizing both structural and behavioral information for the nodes, to run as fast as PageRank. We validate the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm on several real-world datasets.

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Esteban Bautista, Matthieu Latapy

In Social Network Analysis and Mining, 2022, vol. 12, no 1, p. 1-11.

The personalized PageRank algorithm is one of the most versatile tools for the analysis of networks. In spite of its ubiquity, maintaining personalized PageRank vectors when the underlying network constantly evolves is still a challenging task. To address this limitation, this work proposes a novel distributed algorithm to locally update personalized PageRank vectors when the graph topology changes. The proposed algorithm is based on the use of Chebyshev polynomials and a novel update equation that encompasses a large family of PageRank-based methods. In particular, the algorithm has the following advantages: (i) it has faster convergence speed than state-of-the-art alternatives for local PageRank updating; and (ii) it can update the solution of recent generalizations of PageRank for which no updating algorithms have been developed. Experiments in a real-world temporal network of an autonomous system validate the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm.

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