Understanding High-Order Network Structure using Permissible Walks on Attributed Hypergraphs

Abstract

Hypergraphs have been a recent focus of study in mathematical data science as a tool to understand complex networks with high-order connections. One question of particular relevance is how to leverage information carried in hypergraph attributions when doing walk-based techniques. In this work, we focus on a new generalization of a walk in a network that recovers previous approaches and allows for a description of permissible walks in hypergraphs. Permissible walk graphs are constructed by intersecting the attributed $s$-line graph of a hypergraph with a relation respecting graph. The attribution of the hypergraph's line graph commonly carries over information from categorical and temporal attributions of the original hypergraph. To demonstrate this approach on a temporally attributed example, we apply our framework to a Reddit data set composed of hyperedges as threads and authors as nodes where post times are tracked.