A novel method for assessing and measuring homophily in networks through second-order statistics

TL;DR

This paper introduces an efficient, null-model-based method for quantifying homophily in networks with categorical node attributes, demonstrated on biological and social networks, with explicit statistical significance measures.

Contribution

The novel approach prescribes an endogenous null model allowing exact z-score calculations for homophily, improving assessment accuracy and computational efficiency.

Findings

Networks are significantly homophilic with respect to node attributes

Method provides explicit z-scores for homophily significance

Computational complexity is linear in network size

Abstract

We present a new method for assessing and measuring homophily in networks whose nodes have categorical attributes, namely when the nodes of networks come partitioned into classes (colors). We probe this method in two different classes of networks: i) protein-protein interaction (PPI) networks, where nodes correspond to proteins, partitioned according to their functional role, and edges represent functional interactions between proteins ii) Pokec on-line social network, where nodes correspond to users, partitioned according to their age, and edges respresent friendship between users. Similarly to other classical and well consolidated approaches, our method compares the relative edge density of the subgraphs induced by each class with the corresponding expected relative edge density under a null model. The novelty of our approach consists in prescribing an endogenous null model, namely, the sample space of the null model is built on the input network itself. This allows us to give exact explicit expression for the z-score of the relative edge density of each class as well as other related statistics. The z-scores directly quantify the statistical significance of the observed homophily via Tchebycheff inequality. The expression of each z-score is entered by the network structure through basic combinatorial invariant such as the number of subgraphs with two spanning edges. Each z-score is computed in O(n + m) time for a network with n nodes and m edges. This leads to an overall efficient computational method for assesing homophily. We complement the analysis of homophily/heterophily by considering z-scores of the number of isolated nodes in the subgraphs induced by each class, that are computed in O(nm) time. Theoretical results are then exploited to show that, as expected, both the analyzed network classes are significantly homophilic with respect to the considered node properties.