Towards an Information Theory of Complex Networks: Statistical Methods and Applications

ISBN-13: 9780817649036 / Angielski / Twarda / 2011 / 395 str.

Matthias Dehmer; Frank Emmert-Streib; Alexander Mehler

Opis

For over a decade, complex networks have steadily grown as an important tool across a broad array of academic disciplines, with applications ranging from physics to social media. A tightly organized collection of carefully-selected papers on the subject, Towards an Information Theory of Complex Networks: Statistical Methods and Applications presents theoretical and practical results about information-theoretic and statistical models of complex networks in the natural sciences and humanities. The book's major goal is to advocate and promote a combination of graph-theoretic, information-theoretic, and statistical methods as a way to better understand and characterize real-world networks. This volume is the first to present a self-contained, comprehensive overview of information-theoretic models of complex networks with an emphasis on applications. As such, it marks a first step toward establishing advanced statistical information theory as a unified theoretical basis of complex networks for all scientific disciplines and can serve as a valuable resource for a diverse audience of advanced students and professional scientists. While it is primarily intended as a reference for research, the book could also be a useful supplemental graduate text in courses related to information science, graph theory, machine learning, and computational biology, among others.

Spis treści

Preface.- Entropy of Digraphs and Infinite Networks.- An Information-Theoretic Upper Bound on Planar Graphs Using Well-orderly Maps.- Probabilistic Inference Using Function Factorization and Divergence Minimization.- Wave Localization on Complex Networks.- Information-Theoretic Methods in Chemical Graph Theory.- On the Development and Application of Net-Sign Graph Theory.- The Central Role of Information Theory in Ecology.- Inferences About Coupling from Ecological Surveillance Monitoring.- Markov Entropy Centrality.- Social Ontologies as Generalizedd Nearly Acyclic Directed Graphs.- Typology by Means of Language Networks.- Information Theory-Based Measurement of Software.- Fair and Biased Random Walks on Undirected Graphs and Related Entropies.

O autorze

Matthias Dehmer studied mathematics at the University of Siegen (Germany) and received his PhD in computer science from the Technical University of Darmstadt (Germany). Afterwards, he was a research fellow at Vienna Bio Center (Austria), Vienna University of Technology and University of Coimbra (Portugal). Currently, he is Professor at UMIT - The Health and Life Sciences University (Austria). His research interests are in bioinformatics, cancer analysis, chemical graph theory, systems biology, complex networks, complexity, statistics and information theory. In particular, he is also working on machine learning-based methods to design new data analysis methods for solving problems in computational biology and medicinal chemistry. Frank Emmert-Streib studied physics at the University of Siegen (Germany) and received his Ph.D. in Theoretical Physics from the University of Bremen (Germany). He was a postdoctoral research associate at the Stowers Institute for Medical Research (Kansas City, USA) in the Department for Bioinformatics and a Senior Fellow at the University of Washington (Seattle, USA) in the Department of Biostatistics and the Department of Genome Sciences. Currently, he is Lecturer/Assistant Professor at the Queen's University Belfast at the Center for Cancer Research and Cell Biology (CCRCB) leading the Computational Biology and Machine Learning Lab. His research interests are in the field of computational biology, machine learning and biostatistics in the development and application of methods from statistics and machine learning for the analysis of high-throughput data from genomics and genetics experiments.

Blurb

For over a decade, complex networks have steadily grown as an important tool across a broad array of academic disciplines, with applications ranging from physics to social media. A  tightly organized collection of carefully-selected papers on the subject, Towards an Information Theory of Complex Networks: Statistical Methods and Applications presents theoretical and practical results about information-theoretic and statistical models of complex networks in the natural sciences and humanities. The book's major goal is to advocate and promote a combination of graph-theoretic, information-theoretic, and statistical methods as a way to better understand and characterize real-world networks.

This volume is the first to present a self-contained, comprehensive overview of information-theoretic models of complex networks with an emphasis on applications. It begins with four chapters developing the most significant formal-theoretical issues of network modeling, but the majority of the book is devoted to combining theoretical results with an empirical analysis of real networks. Specific topics include:

• chemical graph theory
• ecosystem interaction dynamics
• social ontologies
• language networks
• software systems

This work marks a first step toward establishing advanced statistical information theory as a unified theoretical basis of complex networks for all scientific disciplines. As such, it can serve as a valuable resource for a diverse audience of advanced students and professional scientists. It is primarily intended as a reference for research, but could also be a useful supplemental graduate text in courses related to information science, graph theory, machine learning, and computational biology, among others.