A Systematic Approach for Studying How Topological Measurements Respond to Complex Networks Modifications

TL;DR

This paper systematically investigates how various topological measurements of complex networks respond to modifications like edge removal or rewiring, using similarity indices and hierarchical clustering to analyze different network types.

Contribution

It introduces a comprehensive framework combining similarity measures and hierarchical clustering to quantify and visualize the impact of network modifications on topological measurements.

Findings

Erdős-Rényi and Barabási-Albert networks respond similarly to modifications.

Geographical networks exhibit more heterogeneous topological features.

Three types of topological changes are identified as a result of network modifications.

Abstract

Different types of graphs and complex networks have been characterized, analyzed, and modeled based on measurements of their respective topology. However, the available networks may constitute approximations of the original structure as a consequence of sampling incompleteness, noise, and/or error in the representation of that structure. Therefore, it becomes of particular interest to quantify how successive modifications may impact a set of adopted topological measurements, and how respectively undergone changes can be interrelated, which has been addressed in this paper by considering similarity networks and hierarchical clustering approaches. These studies are developed respectively to several topological measurements (accessibility, degree, hierarchical degree, clustering coefficient, betweenness centrality, assortativity, and average shortest path) calculated from complex networks of three main types (Erd\H{o}s-R\'enyi, Barab\'asi-Albert, and geographical) with varying sizes or subjected to progressive edge removal or rewiring. The coincidence similarity index, which can implement particularly strict comparisons, is adopted for two main purposes: to quantify and visualize how the considered topological measurements respond to the considered network alterations and to represent hierarchically the relationships between the observed changes undergone by the considered topological measurements. Several results are reported and discussed, including the identification of three types of topological changes taking place as a consequence of the modifications. In addition, the changes observed for the Erd\H{o}s-R\'enyi and Barab\'asi-Albert networks resulted mutually more similarly affected by topological changes than for the geometrical networks. The latter type of network has been identified to have more heterogeneous topological features than the other two types of networks.