Investigating Fitness Measures for the Automatic Construction of Graph Models

Abstract

Graph models are often constructed as a tool to better understand the growth dynamics of complex networks. Traditionally, graph models have been constructed through a very time consuming and difficult manual process. Recently, there have been various methods proposed to alleviate the manual efforts required when constructing these models, using statistical and evolutionary strategies. A major difficulty associated with automated approaches lies in the evaluation of candidate models. To address this difficulty, this paper examines a number of well-known network properties using a proposed meta-analysis procedure. The meta-analysis demonstrated how these network measures interacted when used together as classifiers to determine network, and thus model, (dis)similarity. The analytical results formed the basis of a fitness evaluation scheme used in a genetic programming (GP) system to automatically construct graph models for complex networks. The GP-based automatic inference system was used to reproduce two well-known graph models, the results of which indicated that the evolved models exemplified striking similarity when compared to their respective targets on a number of structural network properties.