Measuring and utilizing temporal network dissimilarity

Abstract

Quantifying the structural and functional differences of temporal networks is a fundamental and challenging problem in the era of big data. This work proposes a temporal dissimilarity measure for temporal network comparison based on the fastest arrival distance distribution and spectral entropy based Jensen-Shannon divergence. Experimental results on both synthetic and empirical temporal networks show that the proposed measure could discriminate diverse temporal networks with different structures by capturing various topological and temporal properties. Moreover, the proposed measure can discern the functional distinctions and is found effective applications in temporal network classification and spreadability discrimination.