Network Classification Based Structural Analysis of Real Networks and their Model-Generated Counterparts

TL;DR

This study uses machine learning to analyze and classify real and synthetic networks, revealing domain-specific structural differences and limitations of current network models in capturing certain properties.

Contribution

It unifies various data-driven network analysis methods and evaluates the ability of models to replicate real network metrics and relationships.

Findings

Structural metric correlations vary across network domains.

Small metric sets can classify network domains effectively.

Models accurately reproduce degree distributions but struggle with clustering and diameter.

Abstract

Data-driven analysis of complex networks has been in the focus of research for decades. An important area of research is to study how well real networks can be described with a small selection of metrics, furthermore how well network models can capture the relations between graph metrics observed in real networks. In this paper, we apply machine learning techniques to investigate the aforementioned problems. We study 500 real-world networks along with 2,000 synthetic networks generated by four frequently used network models with previously calibrated parameters to make the generated graphs as similar to the real networks as possible. This paper unifies several branches of data-driven complex network analysis, such as the study of graph metrics and their pair-wise relationships, network similarity estimation, model calibration, and graph classification. We find that the correlation profiles of the structural measures significantly differ across network domains and the domain can be efficiently determined using a small selection of graph metrics. The structural properties of the network models with fixed parameters are robust enough to perform parameter calibration. The goodness-of-fit of the network models highly depends on the network domain. By solving classification problems, we find that the models lack the capability of generating a graph with a high clustering coefficient and relatively large diameter simultaneously. On the other hand, models are able to capture exactly the degree-distribution-related metrics.