Scalar embedding of temporal network trajectories

Lucas Lacasa, F. Javier Marín-Rodríguez, Naoki Masuda and Lluís Arola-Fernández

Chaos, Solitons & Fractals, 2025, vol. 199, issue P1

Abstract: 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.

Keywords: Temporal networks; Network trajectories; Network embedding; Temporal network embedding; Time series (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2025
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0960077925006125
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:chsofr:v:199:y:2025:i:p1:s0960077925006125

DOI: 10.1016/j.chaos.2025.116599

Access Statistics for this article

Chaos, Solitons & Fractals is currently edited by Stefano Boccaletti and Stelios Bekiros

More articles in Chaos, Solitons & Fractals from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Thayer, Thomas R. ().