Enhancing Edge Attack Strategy via an OWA Operator-Based Ensemble Design in Real-World Networks.

Yuyuan Yang,Baoan Ren,Hongfu Liu,Yuan Feng,Chengyi Zeng

doi:10.3390/e22080830

Yuyuan Yang, Baoan Ren + Show 3 more

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https://doi.org/10.3390/e22080830

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Abstract

Network disintegration has been an important research hotspot in complex networks for a long time. From the perspective of node attack, researchers have devoted to this field and carried out numerous works. In contrast, the research on edge attack strategy is insufficient. This paper comprehensively evaluates the disintegration effect of each structural similarity index when they are applied to the weighted-edge attacks model. Experimental results show that the edge attack strategy based on a single similarity index will appear limited stability and adaptability. Thus, motivated by obtaining a stable disintegration effect, this paper designs an edge attack strategy based on the ordered weighted averaging (OWA) operator. Through final experimental results, we found that the edge attack strategy proposed in this paper not only achieves a more stable disintegration effect on eight real-world networks, but also significantly improves the disintegration effect when applied on a single network in comparison with the original similarity index.

Highlights

In our daily life, infrastructure networks such as the power system, aviation and transportation networks play an indispensable role in maintaining the normal operation of human society
When we extend them to the level of edge attack strategy, we need to consider the impact of attack sequence and network structure on the performance of these indices
To visually observe the impact of removing edges, we can use the relative size of giant components to describe the process of network disintegration

Summary

Introduction

Infrastructure networks such as the power system, aviation and transportation networks play an indispensable role in maintaining the normal operation of human society. The academic community has been committed to improving the robustness of infrastructure networks in facing various potential threats. For terrorist networks [6] and disease spreading network [7] that are considered to be harmful, how to effectively destroy these networks has given birth to the study of network disintegration. The ultimate goal of studying the network disintegration is to obtain the optimal attack strategy to the nodes or edges in the network [8]. The problem of finding the optimal set of key nodes or edges to destroy has been proved to be a non-deterministic polynomial-time (NP) hard problem [9,10]. The relative size of giant components is often used to evaluate the disintegration effect during the attack. The faster the size of giant components decreases, the more effective the attack strategy is

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