Predicting Graph Categories from Structural Properties

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates that complex networks from various domains can be accurately classified based on their structural properties, and synthetic networks are easily distinguishable from real ones, highlighting domain-specific structural signatures.

Contribution

The study introduces a method for predicting network categories using structural features, showing high accuracy across real and synthetic networks, and revealing the distinctiveness of domain-specific network structures.

Findings

Achieved 96.6% classification accuracy with random forests.

Networks from different domains have unique structural signatures.

Synthetic graphs are nearly perfectly classified by their generating models.

Abstract

This paper has been withdrawn from arXiv.org due to a disagreement among the authors related to several peer-review comments received prior to submission on arXiv.org. Even though the current version of this paper is withdrawn, there was no disagreement between authors on the novel work in this paper. One specific issue was the discussion of related work by Ikehara \& Clauset (found on page 8 of the previously posted version). Peer-review comments on a similar version made ALL authors aware that the discussion misrepresented their work prior to submission to arXiv.org. However, some authors choose to post to arXiv a minimally updated version without the consent of all authors or properly addressing this attribution issue. ================ Original Paper Abstract: Complex networks are often categorized according to the underlying phenomena that they represent such as molecular interactions, re-tweets, and brain activity. In this work, we investigate the problem of predicting the category (domain) of arbitrary networks. This includes complex networks from different domains as well as synthetically generated graphs from five different network models. A classification accuracy of $96.6\%$ is achieved using a random forest classifier with both real and synthetic networks. This work makes two important findings. First, our results indicate that complex networks from various domains have distinct structural properties that allow us to predict with high accuracy the category of a new previously unseen network. Second, synthetic graphs are trivial to classify as the classification model can predict with near-certainty the network model used to generate it. Overall, the results demonstrate that networks drawn from different domains (and network models) are trivial to distinguish using only a handful of simple structural properties.