Time series analysis of temporal networks

Abstract

An important feature of all real-world networks is that the network structure changes over time. Due to this dynamic nature, it becomes difficult to propose suitable growth models that can explain the various important characteristic properties of these networks. In fact, in many application oriented studies only knowing these properties is sufficient. We, in this paper show that even if the network structure at a future time point is not available one can still manage to estimate its properties. We propose a novel method to map a temporal network to a set of time series instances, analyze them and using a standard forecast model of time series, try to predict the properties of a temporal network at a later time instance. We mainly focus on the temporal network of human face- to-face contacts and observe that it represents a stochastic process with memory that can be modeled as ARIMA. We use cross validation techniques to find the percentage accuracy of our predictions. An important observation is that the frequency domain properties of the time series obtained from spectrogram analysis could be used to refine the prediction framework by identifying beforehand the cases where the error in prediction is likely to be high. This leads to an improvement of 7.96% (for error level <= 20%) in prediction accuracy on an average across all datasets. As an application we show how such prediction scheme can be used to launch targeted attacks on temporal networks.