sparsify.with.simmelian {backbone}

Extract Nick et al's (2013) Simmelian backbone

Description

sparsify.with.simmelian is a wrapper for sparsify() that extracts the simmelian backbone described by Nick et al. (2013). It is equivalent to sparsify(escore = "triangles", normalize = "embeddedness", filter = "threshold", umst = FALSE).

Usage

sparsify.with.simmelian(U, s, class = "original", narrative = FALSE)

Arguments

U

An unweighted unipartite graph, as: (1) an adjacency matrix in the form of a matrix or sparse Matrix; (2) an edgelist in the form of a two-column dataframe; (3) an igraph object.

s

numeric: Sparsificiation threshold, 0 < s < 1; larger values yield sparser graphs

class

string: the class of the returned backbone graph, one of c("original", "matrix", "Matrix", "igraph", "edgelist"). If "original", the backbone graph returned is of the same class as U.

narrative

boolean: TRUE if suggested text & citations should be displayed.

Value

An unweighted, undirected, unipartite graph of class class.

References

package: Neal, Z. P. (2022). backbone: An R Package to Extract Network Backbones. PLOS ONE, 17, e0269137. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0269137

model: Nick, B., Lee, C., Cunningham, P., & Brandes, U. (2013, August). Simmelian backbones: Amplifying hidden homophily in facebook networks. In Proceedings of the 2013 IEEE/ACM international conference on advances in social networks analysis and mining (pp. 525-532). doi:10.1145/2492517.2492569

Examples

U <- igraph::sample_sbm(60, matrix(c(.75,.25,.25,.25,.75,.25,.25,.25,.75),3,3), c(20,20,20))
plot(U) #A hairball
sparse <- sparsify.with.simmelian(U, s = 0.5, narrative = TRUE)
plot(sparse) #Clearly visible communities