Network mutual information measures for graph similarity

TL;DR

This paper introduces a family of principled, interpretable graph mutual information measures based on information theory, enabling meaningful comparison of network structures at multiple scales.

Contribution

It presents novel information-theoretic measures for graph similarity that incorporate multiscale structural information and are validated on real and synthetic data.

Findings

Effectively distinguish meaningful network overlaps

Capture similarity across different scales

Highlight intuitive network features

Abstract

A wide range of tasks in network analysis, such as clustering network populations or identifying anomalies in temporal graph streams, require a measure of the similarity between two graphs. To provide a meaningful data summary for downstream scientific analyses, the graph similarity measures used for these tasks must be principled, interpretable, and capable of distinguishing meaningful overlapping network structure from statistical noise at different scales of interest. Here we derive a family of graph mutual information measures that satisfy these criteria and are constructed using only fundamental information theoretic principles. Our measures capture the information shared among networks according to different encodings of their structural information, with our mesoscale mutual information measure allowing for network comparison under any specified network coarse-graining. We test our measures in a range of applications on real and synthetic network data, finding that they effectively highlight intuitive aspects of network similarity across scales in a variety of systems.