Greg Morrison
Harvard University
School of Engineering & Applied Science
Wednesday, February 23, 2011
4:30 p.m.
Cardwell 102
Generalized Erdos Numbers, Networks, and Communities
Concepts from graph theory have been applied to a wide range of physical, biological, and sociological systems. In this talk, I will present a novel topological measure of closeness between nodes, the Generalized Erdos Numbers (GENs). While the approach is derived with collaboration networks in mind, this measure can be broadly applied to a wide variety of problems. The utility of the GENs will be explored by considering a variety of real world and artificial examples, such as movie ratings prediction using a small subset of the NetFlix Prize data, as well as in predicting the asymmetries in first-passage times of random walks. This topological measure also suggests a new and accurate method of detecting hierarchical communities in structured networks which does not rely on null models or arbitrary parameters.