The interplay between microscopic and mesoscopic structures in complex networks

Jörg Reichardt, Roberto C. Alamino, David Saad

    Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

    Abstract

    Understanding a complex network's structure holds the key to understanding its function. The physics community has contributed a multitude of methods and analyses to this cross-disciplinary endeavor. Structural features exist on both the microscopic level, resulting from differences between single node properties, and the mesoscopic level resulting from properties shared by groups of nodes. Disentangling the determinants of network structure on these different scales has remained a major, and so far unsolved, challenge. Here we show how multiscale generative probabilistic exponential random graph models combined with efficient, distributive message-passing inference techniques can be used to achieve this separation of scales, leading to improved detection accuracy of latent classes as demonstrated on benchmark problems. It sheds new light on the statistical significance of motif-distributions in neural networks and improves the link-prediction accuracy as exemplified for gene-disease associations in the highly consequential Online Mendelian Inheritance in Man database.
    Original languageEnglish
    Article number21282
    Number of pages8
    JournalPLoS ONE
    Volume6
    Issue number8
    DOIs
    Publication statusPublished - 1 Aug 2011

    Bibliographical note

    Copyright: © 2011 Reichardt et al. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.

    Keywords

    • network structure
    • multiscale generative probabilistic exponential random graph models
    • distributive message-passing inference techniques
    • scale
    • accuracy
    • neural networks
    • motif-distributions
    • link-prediction accuracy

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