Models of similarity in complex networks

Abstract

The analysis of networks describing many social, economic, technological, biological and other systems has attracted a lot of attention last decades. Since most of these complex systems evolve over time, there is a need to investigate the changes, which appear in the system, in order to assess the sustainability of the network and to identify stable periods. In the literature, there have been developed a large number of models that measure the similarity among the networks. There also exist some surveys, which consider a limited number of similarity measures and then perform their correlation analysis, discuss their properties or assess their performances on synthetic benchmarks or real networks. The aim of the article is to extend these studies. The article considers 39 graph distance measures and compares them on simple graphs, random graph models and real networks. The author also evaluates the performance of the models in order to identify which of them can be applied to large networks. The results of the study reveal some important aspects of existing similarity models and provide a better understanding of their advantages and disadvantages. The major finding of the work is that many graph similarity measures of different nature are well correlated and that some comprehensive methods are well agreed with simple models. Such information can be used for the choice of appropriate similarity measure as well as for further development of new models for similarity assessment in network structures.