Lunedì 20 novembre, alle ore 12:00, nell'aula G (ex Psicologia) del Dipartimento di Matematica e Fisica della Università degli Studi della Campania “Luigi Vanvitelli”, la Dott.ssa Luisa Cutillo, ricercatore presso il Dipartimento di Studi Aziendali e Quantitativi della Università degli Studi di Napoli "Parthenope” e Visiting Academic presso il Department of Computer Science, University of Sheffield, UK, terrà un seminario dal titolo

Community Structures in Networks: a Robustness measure

Abstract: 'Community structure' is a commonly observed feature of real networks. The term refers to the presence in a network of groups of nodes (communities) that feature high internal connectivity and are poorly connected to each other. Whereas the issue of community detection has been addressed in several works, the problem of validating a partition of nodes as a good community structure for a network has received little attention and remains an open issue. 

I will introduce a methodology able to clearly detect if the community structure found by some algorithms is statistically significant. Given a community detection method and a network of interest, the proposal examines the stability of the partition recovered against random perturbations of the original graph structure. To address this issue, a perturbation strategy and a null model graph, which matches the original in some of its structural properties, but is otherwise a random graph, is specified. A set of procedures is built based on a special measure of clustering distance, namely Variation of Information, using tools set up for functional data analysis. Results obtained with the proposed technique on simulated and real datasets will be shown and discussed.

Il Seminario è proposto dalla prof.ssa Rosanna Verde