2024/11/29 by Lucas Lacasa, Lacasa, Lucas, F. Javier Marín-Rodríguez +5 · 1 voice · 2 citations
Physics and Astronomy · #Complex Network Analysis Techniques #Opinion Dynamics and Social Influence #cs.SI #physics.data-an #physics.soc-ph
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2412.02715
openalex publication_date 2024/11/29 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
A temporal network -- a collection of snapshots recording the evolution of a network whose links appear and disappear dynamically -- can be interpreted as a trajectory in graph space. In order to characterize the complex dynamics of such trajectory via the tools of time series analysis and signal processing, it is sensible to preprocess the trajectory by embedding it in a low-dimensional Euclidean space. Here we argue that, rather than the topological structure of each network snapshot, the main property of the trajectory that needs to be preserved in the embedding is the relative graph distance between snapshots. This idea naturally leads to dimensionality reduction approaches that explicitly consider relative distances, such as Multidimensional Scaling (MDS) or identifying the distance matrix as a feature matrix in which to perform Principal Component Analysis (PCA). This paper provides a comprehensible methodology that illustrates this approach. Its application to a suite of generative network trajectory models and empirical data certify that nontrivial dynamical properties of the network trajectories are preserved already in their scalar embeddings, what enables the possibility of performing time series analysis in temporal networks.