| DATE: | Thursday, April 19, 2012 |
| TIME: | 3:00 pm |
| PLACE: | Council Room (SITE 5-084) |
| TITLE: | Managing Node Disappearance in Social Networks using Information Flow |
| PRESENTER: | Idrissa Sarr Université du Québec en Outaouais |
| ABSTRACT: Social networks are dynamic structures in which entities and links appear and
disappear for different reasons.
Starting from the observation that each entity plays a more or less important role
in transmitting the information inside a network, the objective of
this talk is to propose a method which exploits the role played by a given node to
both estimate the impact
of its disappearance on the information flow, and conduct network changes to restore
the information flow
with a similar quality as before the node disappearance. To this end, we propose a
network restructuring
approach that categorizes nodes into critical and noncritical classes based on their
role, and hence, manages
their disappearance appropriately by adding new links in a parsimonious way and
selecting a substitute for a
deleted critical node. As opposed to a previously defined solution, our approach
adds links that are just
enough to maintain the quality of the information flow within the network as before
a node deletion. A prototype
is designed and implemented using an open source social network analysis library
(NetworkX). Its validation
is conducted using network data sets with various sizes. The empirical study shows a
low network update,
a quite constant quality of the information flow and reasonable execution times
after a node deletion.
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