Foundations of multidimensional network analysis

Berlingerio Michele, Coscia Michele, Giannotti Fosca, Monreale Anna, Pedreschi Dino

Social Network  Graph Theory  Complex networks  Database Applications  Multidimensional networks  Multidimensional network analysis  Complex Network 

Complex networks have been receiving increasing attention by the scientific community, thanks also to the increasing availability of real-world network data. In the last years, the multidimensional nature of many real world networks has been pointed out, i.e. many networks containing multiple connections between any pair of nodes have been analyzed. Despite the importance of analyzing this kind of networks was recognized by previous works, a complete framework for multidimensional network analysis is still missing. Such a framework would enable the analysts to study different phenomena, that can be either the generalization to the multidimensional setting of what happens inmonodimensional network, or a new class of phenomena induced by the additional degree of complexity that multidimensionality provides in real networks. The aim of this paper is then to give the basis for multidimensional network analysis: we develop a solid repertoire of basic concepts and analytical measures, which takes into account the general structure of multidimensional networks. We tested our framework on a real world multidimensional network, showing the validity and the meaningfulness of the measures introduced, that are able to extract important, nonrandom, information about complex phenomena.

Source: 2011 International Conference on Advances in Social Networks Analysis and Mining, ASONAM 2011, pp. 485–489, Kaohsiung, Taiwan, 25-27 July 2011

Publisher: IEEE Computer Society, Los Alamitos, CA, USA

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