Network theory

About: Network theory is a research topic. Over the lifetime, 2257 publications have been published within this topic receiving 109864 citations.

Eigencentrality based on dissimilarity measures reveals central nodes in complex networks

Abstract: One of the most important problems in complex network’s theory is the location of the entities that are essential or have a main role within the network. For this purpose, the use of dissimilarity measures (specific to theory of classification and data mining) to enrich the centrality measures in complex networks is proposed. The centrality method used is the eigencentrality which is based on the heuristic that the centrality of a node depends on how central are the nodes in the immediate neighbourhood (like rich get richer phenomenon). This can be described by an eigenvalues problem, however the information of the neighbourhood and the connections between neighbours is not taken in account, neglecting their relevance when is one evaluates the centrality/importance/influence of a node. The contribution calculated by the dissimilarity measure is parameter independent, making the proposed method is also parameter independent. Finally, we perform a comparative study of our method versus other methods reported in the literature, obtaining more accurate and less expensive computational results in most cases.

A graph-theoretic analysis of the human protein-interaction network using multicore parallel algorithms

Abstract: Due to fundamental physical limitations and power constraints, we are witnessing a paradigm shift in commodity microprocessor architecture to multicore designs. Continued performance now requires the exploitation of concurrency at the algorithm level. In this article, we demonstrate the application of high performance computing techniques in systems biology and present multicore algorithms for the important research problem of protein-interaction network (PIN) analysis. PINs play an important role in understanding the functional and organizational principles of biological processes. Promising computational techniques for key systems biology research problems such as identification of signaling pathways, novel protein function prediction, and the study of disease mechanisms, are based on topological characteristics of the protein interactome. Several complex network models have been proposed to explain the evolution of protein networks, and these models primarily try to reproduce the topological features observed in yeast, the model eukaryote interactome. In this article, we study the structural properties of a high-confidence human interaction network, constructed by assimilating recent experimentally derived interaction data. We identify topological properties common to the yeast and human protein networks. Betweenness is a quantitative measure of centrality of an entity in a complex network, and is based on computing all-pairs shortest paths in the graph. A novel contribution of our work is the analysis of the degree-betweenness centrality correlation in the human PIN. Jeong et al. empirically showed that betweenness is positively correlated with the essentiality and evolutionary age of a protein. We observe that proteins with high betweenness, but low degree (or connectivity) are abundant in the human PIN. We have designed efficient and portable parallel implementations for the exact calculation of betweenness and other compute-intensive centrality metrics relevant to interactome analysis. For example, on the Sun Fire T2000 server with the UltraSparc T1 (Niagara) processor, we achieve a relative speedup of about 16 using 32 threads for a typical instance of betweenness centrality on a PIN, reducing the running time from nearly 312min to 13s.

Intra, Extra, and Internets in Franchise Network Organizations

Abstract: This study integrates thoughts related with electronic communication systems, labeled as Intra, Extra and Internet, with the core concepts of network theory and proposes a conceptual model for business-to-business firms. The context used for this model development is franchise systems. During this process, advantages and disadvantages associated with viewing franchise systems as network organizations as well as incorporating electronic communication systems as a catalyst of movement towards network organization are discussed. We hope that this study forms a basis for future investigation of franchise systems from a network perspective (rather than just a dyadic perspective), with the Intra, Extra, and Internet as a catalyst.