Analytics for directed contact networks

Abstract

Abstract Directed contact networks (DCNs) are temporal networks that are useful for analyzing and modeling phenomena in transportation, communications, epidemiology and social networking. Specific sequences of contacts can underlie higher-level behaviors such as flows that aggregate contacts based on some notion of semantic and temporal proximity. We describe a simple inhomogeneous Markov model to infer flows and taint bounds associated with such higher-level behaviors, and also discuss how to aggregate contacts within DCNs and/or dynamically cluster their vertices. We provide examples of these constructions in the contexts of information transfers within computer and air transportation networks, thereby indicating how they can be used for data reduction and anomaly detection.